Navajo language
As a linguist, Young worked primarily on programs related to analyzing and expanding documentation of the Navajo language, encouraging its written use, and education in the language. He collaborated with Navajo scholar William Morgan on all his major projects. From the 1940s through the 1950s, they produced a variety of reading materials in Navajo, and three "important works on lexicon and grammar." The first was a dictionary, "The Navajo Language" (1943), organized by root, as one of the principal elements in the verbs of the Athabaskan languages.