Navajo Sound Profile
The goal of this project is to provide an online resource on the sound phonemes of Diné Bizaad
for teachers and students of the Navajo language. Although Navajo language has a well-
documented grammar and sound system (e.g., Young & Morgan 1987, McDonough 2004), there
are no available examples of the sounds of the Navajo language. There continues to be a lack of
good sound sources that is publicly available to anyone. The Eastern Navajo Sound Database
(ENSD) is an online datum of examples of words demonstrating the sound phonemes of Navajo
(cf. Dene Speech Atlas).
Each entry includes the standard Navajo orthography and the IPA, a
waveform, a spectrogram (voice print), an audio file, descriptions of the sounds based on a recent
study (Chee et al. ms), and midsagittal faces demonstrating air flow. Along with the set of sound
files, a midsagittal view of the vocal tract with the names and positions of the articulators in
Navajo and a Navajo specific IPA chart is included (Chee & Yazzie July 2021, OSF). The ENSD
resides in the University of New Mexico Digital Repository and Navajo Sound Profile webpage, which make this resource available
to the public.
(N.B. If you click the images below, you can see the larger images in new taps.)
