Language Status
The American Community Survey of 2007 reported 170,717 speakers of Navajo, making it the only Native American language to warrant a separate line in the statistical tables. The majority of speakers live on the Navajo Nation. Of these, 2.9% were monolingual with no knowledge of English. The four metro- and micropolitan areas with the largest number of speakers were Farmington (16.5%), Gallup (12%), Flagstaff (10.3%), and Albuquerque (5.4%).
A number of bilingual immersion schools operate within Navajo-speaking regions to preserve and promote usage of the language.
Read more about this topic: Navajo Language
Famous quotes containing the words language and/or status:
“It would seem as if the very language of our parlors would lose all its nerve and degenerate into palaver wholly, our lives pass at such remoteness from its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes are necessarily so far fetched.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“Knowing how beleaguered working mothers truly areknowing because I am one of themI am still amazed at how one need only say I work to be forgiven all expectation, to be assigned almost a handicapped status that no decent human being would burden further with demands. I work has become the universally accepted excuse, invoked as an all-purpose explanation for bowing out, not participating, letting others down, or otherwise behaving inexcusably.”
—Melinda M. Marshall (20th century)