The Navajo language (Diné bizaad) has a vocabulary of landscape terms that allows speakers to communicate about their environment. This book documents that vocabulary and provides photographic illustration of many of the terms. The meanings of these terms seldom match the English-language terms one-to-one. Terms include explicit reference to earth materials such as water or rock/stone. Rather than alphabetically, this book is organized by material and form categories.
This dictionary is a valuable resource for language preservation in schools and elsewhere, and for linguists, anthropologists, geographers, and earth scientists interested in indigenous conceptualization of landscape and environment.