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The Japanese encounter with Navajo (Diné) “code talkers” in World War II 161
to say, the speaking Navajo code talker (Addresser) is moving down the hierarchy
by taking his concept of the object “Observation Airplane”, uttering the
word Ne-as-jah, thereby encoding “Owl”. When the listening Navajo code
talker (Addressee) hears this message, he speaks/translates in English “Observation
Airplane”, thereby, moving up the hierarchy to decode Navajo “Ne-as-jah”
into the English “Owl”.
Figure 8. Sample lexicon item in the code-talker discourse
Again using the discourse example of Figure 8, the use of the Navajo language
creates an effective secret code by making the dominant discourse incomprehensible
to the Japanese listener. The discourse is utterly confusing because
the phonology of the message “sounds” very familiar (discours, parole),
yet is completely frustrating because the semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic
context (langage, langue) is nonsense and noise, to which Japanese perception
is especially sensitive.
While it is beyond the scope of my analysis to discuss conceptions of Navajo
cosmology, I have noted that their view of Nature is at the heart of their
spiritual and religious beliefs. In this context, I must note that the very project
of forming the code talkers as a military unit reinforced their sociocentric cul-