From the late 1930s, Young cooperated with the Navajo linguist and scholar William Morgan, publishing a "practical orthography" in 1937.
[5] After earning a liberal arts degree from the University of Illinois in 1935, he moved to New Mexico for Native American studies.
While working at the Southwestern Range and Sheepbreeding Laboratory in Fort Wingate, New Mexico, he became acquainted with William Morgan, a Navajo fellow worker and native of the city.
[6] In the early 1940s Young joined the Bureau of Indian Affairs, where he worked in the Southwest at the Navajo Agency in Window Rock, Arizona.
Young served a stint in the Marine Corps and during this period, he worked on the Navajo Code Talker project.
The Academy was founded that year and formally incorporated in 1999, to train teachers in scientific study of the Navajo language.
[8] In January 2006, the Linguistic Society of America honored Robert Young, then 93, at their Annual Meeting, presenting him with the Kenneth Hale Award, stating: "The Navajo Language is remarkable for its structure and the robustness of its documentation.
Their system links the dictionary entries to the conjugation and paradigm patterns that that particular word may appear in, thus reflecting a native speaker’s knowledge and providing a map of morpheme distribution and co-occurrence restrictions.
"[9] The University of New Mexico Department of Linguistics established a scholarship in Young's honor, available for students who study Native American languages.