KTNN : Playing Country Music and Speaking Navajo

One of the pleasures of a car trip we made out west a couple of years ago was tuning in KTNN as we crisscrossed  New Mexico and Arizona.

AT 660 on the AM dial, KTNN is a 50,000-watt giant that blankets the Four Corners area during the day and reaches a huge part of the West at night, even up and down the Pacific coast, at least according its broadcast footprint that you can find on it its web site.

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I've never had much of a facility for learning second languages, though I've tried with everything from Spanish (my most successful) to Samoan and Icelandic. Languages continue to fascinate me, though, and the appeal to me of KTNN is that much of what you hear on it is in Navajo. The station is headquartered in Window Rock, Arizona, capital of the Navajo Nation, and its announcers, I think, are all Navajo, or Diné, as many of the people prefer to call themselves.

Listening over the car radio as you travel across the mesa-studded landscaping, you're likely to hear a station ID in English followed by local news or a community event announcement in Navajo.

KTNN's programming is country music -- modern country, at that (as opposed to Old Time or even honky tonk, the forms that I prefer). But it's listenable, and more so because nearly every third or fourth song (at least) is a Native American song, such as you would hear at a pow-wow. Even now, as I sit here at home on the East Coast, the sound of a Navajo woman's unaccompanied chant, coming from my radio speaker, evokes ancient landscapes and ways of life -- at least, the images I have constructed of them.

Navajo has more than 140,000 living native speakers, and is used interchangeably with English in many Navajo communities, so it makes sense that a radio station situated in the heart of the reservation would have a large part of its programming in the language. 

KTNN is a commercial station that was established as a Navajo Nation Enterprise in 1985 and made its first broadcast in 1986. Its 50,000-watt license was the last one granted by the FCC.

As much as anything, KTNN -- with its mix of English and Navajo, and its alternation of the latest sounds from Nashville with the old songs of the region's native people -- is a reminder, reflection and a continuation of the collision of cultures in the American Southwest. 

The station provides a high-quality audio stream, which you can listen to over your computer or on any Internet radio device using the vTuner database (it might be available in other database formats as well, but vTuner is what my Aluratek device uses, so that's what I know).