Files
Description
The Navajo Corpus of Historical Narratives is a digital compilation of morphologically annotated narratives. They were first published by Robert W. Young and William Morgan in the 1950’s in the volumes Navajo Historical Selections (1954) and The Trouble at Round Rock (1952). Nine out of 28 narratives are included in the corpus, totaling over 10,000 Navajo words. The corpus contributes to the understanding of the Navajo language by offering interlinear glosses of words, morphemes, morphs, and a free translation. These different interlinear tiers bridge the gap between the original Navajo text and the free translation provided by Young and Morgan, also expanding the knowledge of word and sentence structure in narrative usage. The attached guidelines include information on the glossing strategy applied for the complex morphology of Navajo as an aid for future annotations. The resources used for the annotation are FieldWorks Explorer and the dictionaries Young, Morgan and Midgette (1992), and Young and Morgan (1987). This work was supported by the Center for Regional Studies at The University of New Mexico.
Publication Date
Spring 5-2025
City
Albuquerque
Keywords
Navajo Language, Navajo Linguistics, Navajo Corpus, Historical, Narrative, Historical Narratives, Indigenous Language Corpus, Diné Bizaad, Indigenous Language Study, Historical Languages, Historical Corpus, Athabaskan, Athapascan, Dene
Disciplines
Anthropological Linguistics and Sociolinguistics | Comparative and Historical Linguistics | Discourse and Text Linguistics | Language Description and Documentation | Linguistics | Morphology
Recommended Citation
Denk, Lukas and Melvatha R. Chee. "A Navajo Corpus of Historical Narratives." (2025). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/navajocorpus/1
Included in
Anthropological Linguistics and Sociolinguistics Commons, Comparative and Historical Linguistics Commons, Discourse and Text Linguistics Commons, Language Description and Documentation Commons, Morphology Commons
Comments
Acknowledgement: The authors thank Geunho Cho and Bethany Lycan for their assistance in preparing the final documents uploaded to this Digital Repository. Nitsxaago Ahxéhee’!