Cherokee language

History

Before the development of the Cherokee syllabary in the 1820s, Cherokee was an oral language only. The syllabary was invented by Sequoyah in the late 1810s and early 1820s; he could not previously read any script. Sequoyah had some contact with English literacy through his white father and through trade near Fort Loudoun. He first experimented with logograms, then with symbols for ideas, but both approaches proved impractical.

He eventually created a written symbol for each syllable, producing a system of 86 characters after about a month. The syllabary now has 85 characters. Some typeface syllables resemble Latin, Greek, or Cyrillic letters, but the sounds are completely different. Sequoyah began work around 1809, spending a year on his initial efforts, which his wife is said to have burned, believing it to be witchcraft.

Status and preservation efforts

In 2019, the Tri-Council of Cherokee tribes declared a state of emergency for the language due to the threat of extinction, calling for enhanced revitalization programs. The language retains about 1,500 to 2,100 speakers, with an average of eight fluent speakers dying each month and only a handful of people under 40 fluent as of 2019. In 1986, the literacy rate for first language speakers was 15–20% who could read and 5% who could write.

A 2005 survey determined the Eastern Band had 460 fluent speakers; ten years later, the number was believed to be 200. Cherokee has been co-official with English in the Cherokee Nation since a 1991 legislation, and is also the official language of the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians. Hospitals and health centers within the Cherokee Nation tribal jurisdiction area provide Cherokee language translation services.

Phonology

The Cherokee consonant inventory lacks the labial sounds /p/ and /b/, as well as /f/ and /v/. It has one labial consonant, /m/, which is rare, appearing in no more than ten native words; the Lower dialect does not produce /m/ at all, using /w/ instead. The stops and affricates are voiced at the beginning of syllables and between vowels, and aspirated before /h/.

The phoneme /t/ is palatalized as /tʃ/ in Oklahoma dialects. /ts/ has merged with /tʃ/ in most North Carolina dialects. The sonorants /n/, /l/, /w/, /j/ are devoiced when preceding or following /h/. /m/ is the only true labial and is not reconstructed for Proto-Iroquoian. /h/ is realized as /ɦ/ or even /∅/ in North Carolina dialects. /h/ and /ʔ/ participate in complex rules of laryngeal and tonal alternations, often surfacing as various tones. There are two main competing orthographies, depending on how plain and aspirated stops are represented.

Grammar

Cherokee is a polysynthetic language, which means it builds long words by stringing together many smaller meaning units. A verb must include at least four parts: a pronominal prefix, a root, an aspect suffix, and a modal suffix, creating seventeen distinct tenses. With all possible affix combinations, a single regular verb can take 21,262 different forms.

For instance, gééga, meaning "I am going," breaks down into the prefix g- (first person singular), the root -éé- ("to go"), the aspect suffix -g-, and the modal suffix -a. Pronouns mark three numbers—singular, dual, and plural—but no gender. Third-person pronouns do distinguish animacy, and first-person dual and plural pronouns separate inclusive from exclusive.

There is no dual-plural distinction in the third person, giving ten pronoun categories overall. Pronominal prefixes can indicate both subject and object, and they appear not only on verbs but also on adjectives and nouns. Two standalone pronouns exist: aya for "I/me" and nihi for "you." Animacy matters in pronoun marking, while gender does not.

Did You Know?

• Linguists believe the Cherokee people migrated to the southeast from the Great Lakes region about three thousand years ago.
• The Lower dialect, formerly spoken on the South Carolina–Georgia border, has been extinct since about 1900.
• The Cherokee Phoenix was the first newspaper published by Native Americans in the United States and the first published in a Native American language.