Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

The Navajo Sound System

  • Book
  • © 2003

Overview

Authors:
  1. Joyce McDonough

    1. Department of Linguistics, University of Rochester, Rochester, USA

    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Part of the book series: Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory (SNLT, volume 55)

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this book

Log in via an institution
eBook USD 84.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Other ways to access

Licence this eBook for your library

Institutional subscriptions

Table of contents (7 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xiii
    Download chapter PDF

  2. Introduction

    • Joyce McDonough
    Pages 1-15

  3. Morphology

    • Joyce McDonough
    Pages 17-39

  4. Phonology

    • Joyce McDonough
    Pages 41-66

  5. Duration and Timing

    • Joyce McDonough
    Pages 67-110

  6. Spectral Analyses

    • Joyce McDonough
    Pages 111-162

  7. How to Use Young and Morgan’s

    • Joyce McDonough
    Pages 163-189

  8. Conclusion

    • Joyce McDonough
    Pages 191-192

  9. Back Matter

    Pages 193-214
    Download chapter PDF
Back to top

Keywords

About this book

The Navajo language is spoken by the Navajo people who live in the Navajo Nation, located in Arizona and New Mexico in the southwestern United States. The Navajo language belongs to the Southern, or Apachean, branch of the Athabaskan language family. Athabaskan languages are closely related by their shared morphological structure; these languages have a productive and extensive inflectional morphology. The Northern Athabaskan languages are primarily spoken by people indigenous to the sub-artic stretches of North America. Related Apachean languages are the Athabaskan languages of the Southwest: Chiricahua, Jicarilla, White Mountain and Mescalero Apache. While many other languages, like English, have benefited from decades of research on their sound and speech systems, instrumental analyses of indigenous languages are relatively rare. There is a great deal ofwork to do before a chapter on the acoustics of Navajo comparable to the standard acoustic description of English can be produced. The kind of detailed phonetic description required, for instance, to synthesize natural sounding speech, or to provide a background for clinical studies in a language is well beyond the scope of a single study, but it is necessary to begin this greater work with a fundamental description of the sounds and supra-segmental structure of the language. Inkeeping with this, the goal of this project is to provide a baseline description of the phonetic structure of Navajo, as it is spoken on the Navajo reservation today, to provide a foundation for further work on the language.

Reviews

From the review by Daniel L. Everett, Illinois State University, published in Language 83 (2007): "This book was a pleasure to read. It is laid out well, the spectrograms are clear, and the writing is clear and well-organized. I strongly recommend NSS [The Navajo Sound System] to all Americanists as an example of the kind of detail and care that - in an ideal world - should be standard in all efforts to document and describe Native American Languages."

Authors and Affiliations

  • Department of Linguistics, University of Rochester, Rochester, USA

    Joyce McDonough

Bibliographic Information

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Back to top

Search

Navigation