Listen & Learn Blog

Mark this on the list of “things I didn’t know”: Full moons have names!

According to a post on Space.com, this tradition dates back a few hundred years, to Native Americans of what is now the northern and eastern United States, who gave names to moons in order to keep track of seasons. The name given to the moon was applied to the full month in which it appeared. European settlers followed this custom, and also created their own names.

Here are the names and times for the next couple of months:

May 5, 11:35 p.m. EDT – Full Flower Moon.  Flowers are abundant everywhere at this time. May’s full moon was also known as the Full Corn Planting Moon or the Milk Moon. The moon will also be at perigee just 25 minutes after turning full, at 12:00 a.m. EDT on May 6, at a distance of 221,801 miles (356,955 kilometers) from Earth. Very high ocean tides can be expected from the coincidence of perigee with the full moon.

Jun. 4, 7:12 a.m. EDT – Full Strawberry Moon.  Known to every Algonquin tribe, Europeans called it the Rose Moon. A partial eclipse of the moon will be visible chiefly favoring those living around the Pacific Rim. Observers in Japan and Australia for instance, can see it at, or soon after, moonrise, while those in the western United States and western Canada see it at, or just before, moonset.  At maximum, about 37 percent of the moon’s diameter will be immersed in the dark umbra shadow of the Earth.

What would you name the moon for the month of your birth?

Full moon image from netlancer2006 under the Flickr Creative Commons Licence.

In what seems like good news for Native American languages, the US Census Bureau has reported that 169,000 people speak Navajo.

That figure makes it the Native American language that’s most spoken in homes, but should be treated with caution. For a start, the survey didn’t measure fluency levels – it just asked if a language other than English was spoken in the home.

Evangeline Parsons Yazzie, a Navajo professor at Northern Arizona University, said the figure recently released by the U.S. Census Bureau is no surprise, but can be misleading. The country’s population of Navajos is well over 300,000. For every one who speaks the language, one doesn’t — and those are likely younger Navajos, Yazzie said.

“Navajo has the largest population, they say, of Native speakers, but it also has the largest population of non-speakers,” she said Wednesday. “And it kind of presents a skewed picture.”

The figure is based on five-year estimates from community surveys that allowed the Census for the first time to study small segments of the U.S. population. The Census found in a study released this month that fewer than a half-million people age 5 and over speak a Native American language at home. About 65 percent of them are in nine counties in Arizona, New Mexico and Alaska. (Source: ABC News)