From 1942, the U.S. Marines in the Pacific used the Navajo language as their secret code. It was chosen because it was a very complex language, and because very few non-Navajo could speak it. The Navajo Indians had never needed military vocabulary, so existing words had to be given new meanings. The word hummingbird, dah-he-ti-hi, came to mean fighter plane, for example. Around 400 Navajo Indians, known as the Code Talkers, were trained to use the code-and the Japanese never cracked it.
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