The idea to use Navajo for secure communications came from Philip Johnston, the son of a missionary to the Navajos and one of the few non-Navajos who spoke their language fluently. Reared on the Navajo reservation, Johnston was a World War I veteran who knew of the military’s search for a code that would withstand all attempts to decipher it. He also knew that Native American languages, notably Choctaw, had been used in World War I to encode messages. Johnston believed Navajo answered the military requirement for an undecipherable code because it is an unwritten language of extreme complexity. Its syntax and tonal qualities, not to mention dialects, make it unintelligible to anyone without extensive exposure and training. It has no alphabet or symbols and is spoken only on the Navajo lands of the American Southwest. One estimate indicates that fewer than 30 non-Navajos, none of them Japanese, could understand the language at the outbreak of World War II.

Early in 1942, Johnston met with Major General Clayton B. Vogel, the commanding general of Amphibious Corps, Pacific Fleet, and his staff to convince them of the Navajo language’s value as code. Johnston staged tests under simulated combat conditions, demonstrating that Navajos could encode, transmit and decode a three-line English message in 20 seconds. Machines of the time required 30 minutes to perform the same job. Convinced, Vogel recommended to the Commandant of the Marine Corps that the Marines recruit 200 Navajos.

The author most likely mentions the fact that Navajo “has no alphabet or symbols” in order to

A. emphasize how difficult it is to decipher Navajo language
B. suggest a potential drawback of the use of Navajo for secure communications
C. explain why so few non-Navajos can speak the language
D. highlight the differences between Navajo and other Native American languages
E. suggest that Johnston’s ambitions were impractical



The passage is primarily concerned with

A. examining the complexity of a language
B. profiling someone’s search for a solution to a problem
C. analyzing the benefits and drawbacks of an approach
D. explaining why a certain strategy was adopted
E. dissecting the origins of a certain methodology



Select the sentence in the second or third paragraph of the passage that provides empirical evidence in favor of using Navajo for secure communications