That specialized vocabulary was not part of natural Diné Bizaad; it was a purpose-built overlay that existed only within the code.

As the Code Talkers spoke publicly after declassification, the code vocabulary became, to some degree, part of the public face of the Code Talker story.

People learning about the program learned that a fighter plane was a hummingbird and a battleship was a whale and a submarine was an iron fish.

These code words became, in popular accounts, shorthand for the Code Talker program itself.

But they were not Navajo vocabulary in the ordinary sense.

They were specialized code terms that the Code Talkers themselves had developed for a specific military application.