The popularization of these terms, while it has helped communicate something about how the code worked, has also sometimes created a slightly distorted impression of Diné Bizaad — as if the language were a collection of evocative imagery-based metaphors rather than a complex, tonal, grammatically sophisticated language that is used to discuss the full range of human experience.

The language itself — the full, living language as spoken by fluent speakers in their daily lives — is considerably more complex and considerably more alive than any summary of the code terms can convey.

Understanding the Code Talkers’ achievement requires understanding that they were working in a language of genuine depth and complexity, not in a system of evocative code words.

The code words were the overlay.

The language underneath was the foundation.

That foundation is what the boarding school era had tried to eliminate and what the Code Talkers had carried into the Pacific.