s - Wyższa Szkoła Filologiczna we Wrocławiu

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Richard L. Lanigan
speak their opponent’s language. In short, my goal in this paper is to describe
this little known unique event of languages in contact: The Navajo code talkers.
While bilingual English-Japanese soldiers were available on both sides during
WWII, the U.S. Marine Corps had the innovative idea of using a third language
to confuse the Japanese. This idea was plausible because of the existence
of the Native American ethnic group of the Southwestern United States called
Diné, which means simply the “People” or “Human”(Kluckhohn 1974). The
more common usage (because of history) is Navajo, the name given by the invading
Spanish in the 17th century. Most Navajo’s are bilingual in American
English, many are trilingual in Spanish. The men of this tribe were recruited by
the U.S. Marine Signal Corps to develop a code in the Navajo language to use
on radio-telephones in combat. This is a story of “familiarity” because Navajo is
a tonal language very close in phonology to Japanese, yet utterly incomprehensible,
“frustrating” in syntax and semantics to the Japanese ear. This is the first
level of the code. The second level consisted of using Navajo nouns and verbs
used to describe Nature as substitutes for words in American English used to
describe soldiers’ ranks, equipment, actions, and relationships, along with
names of the countries in the Allied Army.
Thus, even a Japanese who spoke Navajo, there were none! (cf. Davis 2000)
would not understand the message because of the extreme contrast with cultural
referents, especially, nature and its objects. The “view of nature” that one has in
the American Southwest could not be in greater contrast to the cultural frame of
Nature familiar to any Japanese. An additional “familiarity” factor that leads to
intensified frustration is the fact that both the Diné and Japanese are classified
as group or sociocentric cultures where language is in the service of group
perception and affiliation, as opposed to individual expression and reflection (an
egocentric culture characteristic) in English.
1. The cultural history of the people
The Navajo or Diné are justifiably called simply the “People” because they
originated in pre-history and have evolved as a group culture by contact with
many other groups through time. This story is far to complex to recount here,
but let me note that a comprehensive history will be found in two primary
works, The Navajo by Clyde Kluckhohn and Dorothea Leighton (1974) and
more recently Diné: A History of the Navajos by Peter Iverson (2002). The history
begins with the Anasazi (“the ancient ones”) who occupied Canyon de
Chilly in the “Four Corners” area (Figure 1, map site near Chinle) from 100
BCE to 700 CE. The civilization reached its height at Publeo Bonito (Figures
2 and 3; officially the Chaco Culture Natonal Historical Park) from 828 to 1126
CE (Figure 1, map site near Farmington). Although the “Spanish Period” of the