Why Navajo is one of the most difficult languages (2023)

English has 21 letters which we identify as consonants and 5 letters which we identify as vowels, which are used to write ~24 consonants (depending on accent, but generally clustered around there) and a large number of vowels that is impossible to neatly catalog because it varies widely by accent—it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 14-25, depending on accent.

This one is actually a very good example of the problem that OP is describing of non-linguists writing linguistics pieces.

The "50 words for snow" story is one of the first linguistics cautionary tales they'll teach you in a college linguistics course these days, on the same level as the Hyatt Regency walkway collapse is for engineering.

The short of it is that it's based on a misunderstanding of the word "word". English is a very analytic language [0] on the scale of things, meaning it doesn't tend to augment its words to create new meanings. Instead we add adjectives and adverbs and prepositions to adjust a word's meaning.

Inuit languages, meanwhile, are highly agglutinative [0], meaning instead of independent adjectives they attach morphemes (meaningful-chunks-of-speech, think prefixes and suffixes) to the word itself to alter its meaning. That's not really the same thing as having X words for Y, because the words are constructed from parts that have their own, independent meaning—these morphemes are essentially a set of adjectives, adverbs, and prepositions that happen to get attached to a word instead of just placed nearby.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_language

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutinative_language

I'm sure they meant 2000...

Someone else clarified this [0] but got flagged to death for being a bit too harsh, but I do think it's worth mentioning because this is used mistakenly as a prominent example of Navajo's difficulty: the raw numbers of consonants and vowels are not particularly extreme in Navajo, and the numbers that TFA cites for English are wrong.

They seem to have done a relatively simple analysis of the alphabet, but that's not how linguists think about phonology. The alphabet is our way of representing a much more complex system that underlies English, and English's vowel system in particular is far more complex than the alphabet makes it appear.

Our total number of consonants sits at about 24—the alphabet alone would make you forget about some of our affricates (ch as in charge) and some of our fricatives (sh as in shush, zh as in vision, th as in theme, dh as in though), plus a nasal (ng as in ring).

Our vowel system, meanwhile, has anywhere between ~16 in American English to ~25 in Received Pronunciation. Native speakers don't tend to realize just how complicated our vowels are, but getting them wrong is one of the most common ways to get recognized for having an accent.

All told, English has between 40 and 49 phonemes (again, depending on accent), which is quite comparable to Navajo's 45.

I've no doubt that Navajo is harder to learn for most people than English is, but I don't think the phonology plays a big role in that. English's phonology is plenty difficult.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41097443