Cherokee language

History

Literacy

Before the development of the Cherokee syllabary in the 1820s, Cherokee was an oral language only. The Cherokee syllabary is a set of written symbols invented by Sequoyah in the late 1810s and early 1820s to write the Cherokee language. His creation of the syllabary is particularly noteworthy in that he could not previously read any script. Sequoyah had some contact with English literacy and the Roman alphabet through his proximity to Fort Loudoun, where he engaged in trade with Europeans. He was exposed to English literacy through his white father. His limited understanding of the Latin alphabet, including the ability to recognize the letters of his name, may have aided him in the creation of the Cherokee syllabary. When developing the written language, Sequoyah first experimented with logograms, but his system later developed into a syllabary. In his system, each symbol represents a syllable rather than a single phoneme; the 85 (originally 86) characters in the Cherokee syllabary provide a suitable method to write Cherokee. Some typeface syllables do resemble the Latin, Greek, and even the Cyrillic scripts' letters, but the sounds are completely different (for example, the sound is written with a letter that resembles Latin D).

Around 1809, Sequoyah began work to create a system of writing for the Cherokee language. At first he sought to create a character for each word in the language. He spent a year on this effort, leaving his fields unplanted, so that his friends and neighbors thought he had lost his mind. His wife is said to have burned his initial work, believing it to be witchcraft. He finally realized that this approach was impractical because it would require too many pictures to be remembered. He then tried making a symbol for every idea, but this also caused too many problems to be practical.

Sequoyah did not succeed until he gave up trying to represent entire words and developed a written symbol for each syllable in the language. After approximately a month, he had a system of 86 characters. "In their present form [of typeface syllabary, not the original handwritten syllabary], many of the syllabary characters resemble Roman, Cyrillic, or Greek letters, or Arabic numerals," says Janine Scancarelli, a scholar of Cherokee writing, "but there is no apparent relationship between their sounds in other languages and in Cherokee."

Unable to find adults willing to learn the syllabary, he taught it to his daughter, Ayokeh (also spelled Ayoka). Langguth says she was only six years old at the time. He traveled to the Indian Reserves in the Arkansas Territory where some Cherokees had settled. When he tried to convince the local leaders of the syllabary's usefulness, they doubted him, believing that the symbols were merely ad hoc reminders. Sequoyah asked each to say a word, which he wrote down, and then called his daughter in to read the words back. This demonstration convinced the leaders to let him teach the syllabary to a few more people. This took several months, during which it was rumored that he might be using the students for sorcery. After completing the lessons, Sequoyah wrote a dictated letter to each student, and read a dictated response. This test convinced the western Cherokees that he had created a practical writing system.

When Sequoyah returned east, he brought a sealed envelope containing a written speech from one of the Arkansas Cherokee leaders. By reading this speech, he convinced the eastern Cherokees also to learn the system, after which it spread rapidly. In 1825 the Cherokee Nation officially adopted the writing system. From 1828 to 1834, American missionaries assisted the Cherokees in using Sequoyah's original syllabary to develop typeface syllabary characters and print the Cherokee Phoenix, the first newspaper of the Cherokee Nation, with text in both Cherokee and English.

In 1826, the Cherokee National Council commissioned George Lowrey and David Brown to translate and print eight copies of the laws of the Cherokee Nation in the new Cherokee language typeface using Sequoyah's system, but not his original self-created handwritten syllable glyphs.

Once Albert Gallatin saw a copy of Sequoyah's syllabary, he found the syllabary superior to the English alphabet. Even though a Cherokee student must learn 86 syllables instead of 26 letters, they can read immediately. Students could accomplish in a few weeks what students of English writing could learn in two years.

In 1824, the General Council of the Eastern Cherokees awarded Sequoyah a large silver medal in honor of the syllabary. According to Davis, one side of the medal bore his image surrounded by the inscription in English, "Presented to George Gist by the General Council of the Cherokee for his ingenuity in the invention of the Cherokee Alphabet." The reverse side showed two long-stemmed pipes and the same inscription written in Cherokee. Supposedly, Sequoyah wore the medal throughout the rest of his life, and it was buried with him.

By 1825, the Bible and numerous religious hymns and pamphlets, educational materials, legal documents, and books were translated into the Cherokee language. Thousands of Cherokees became literate and the literacy rate for Cherokees in the original syllabary, as well as the typefaced syllabary, was higher in the Cherokee Nation than that of literacy of whites in the English alphabet in the United States.

Though use of the Cherokee syllabary declined after many of the Cherokees were forcibly removed to Indian Territory, present-day Oklahoma, it has survived in private correspondence, renderings of the Bible, and descriptions of Indian medicine and now can be found in books and on the internet among other places.

In February 2022, Motorola Mobility introduced a Cherokee language interface for its latest smartphone. Eastern Band Principal Chief Richard Sneed, who along with other Cherokee leaders worked with Motorola on the development, considered this an effort to preserve the language. Features included not only symbols but also the culture.

Geographic distribution

The language remains concentrated in some Oklahoma communities and communities like Big Cove and Snowbird in North Carolina.

Dialects

At the time of European contact, there were three major dialects of Cherokee: Lower, Middle, and Overhill. The Lower dialect, formerly spoken on the South Carolina-Georgia border, has been extinct since about 1900. Of the remaining two dialects, the Middle dialect (Kituwah) is spoken by the Eastern Band on the Qualla Boundary, and retains ~200 speakers. The Overhill, or Western, dialect is spoken in eastern Oklahoma and by the Snowbird Community in North Carolina by ~1,300 people. The Western dialect is most widely used and is considered the main dialect of the language. Both dialects have had English influence, with the Overhill, or Western dialect showing some Spanish influence as well.

The now extinct Lower dialect spoken by the inhabitants of the Lower Towns in the vicinity of the South Carolina–Georgia border had r as the liquid consonant in its inventory, while both the contemporary Kituhwa dialect spoken in North Carolina and the Overhill dialect contain l.

Language drift

There are two main dialects of Cherokee spoken by modern speakers. The Giduwa (or Kituwah) dialect (Eastern Band) and the Otali dialect (also called the Overhill dialect) spoken in Oklahoma. The Otali dialect has drifted significantly from Sequoyah's syllabary in the past 150 years, and many contracted and borrowed words have been adopted into the language. These noun and verb roots in Cherokee, however, can still be mapped to Sequoyah's syllabary. There are more than 85 syllables in use by modern Cherokee speakers.

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 it going extinct, calling for the enhancement of revitalization programs. The language retains about 1,500 to 2,100 Cherokee speakers, but an average of eight fluent speakers die each month, and only a handful of people under 40 years of age are fluent as of 2019. In 1986, the literacy rate for first language speakers was 15–20% who could read and 5% who could write, according to the 1986 Cherokee Heritage Center. A 2005 survey determined that the Eastern Band had 460 fluent speakers. Ten years later, the number was believed to be 200.

Cherokee is "definitely endangered" in Oklahoma and "severely endangered" in North Carolina according to UNESCO. Cherokee has been the co-official language of the Cherokee Nation alongside English since a 1991 legislation officially proclaimed this under the Act Relating to the Tribal Policy for the Promotion and Preservation of Cherokee Language, History, and Culture. Cherokee is also recognized as the official language of the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians. As Cherokee is official, the entire constitution of the United Keetoowah Band is available in both English and Cherokee. As an official language, any tribal member may communicate with the tribal government in Cherokee or English, English translation services are provided for Cherokee speakers, and both Cherokee and English are used when the tribe provides services, resources, and information to tribal members or when communicating with the tribal council. The 1991 legislation allows the political branch of the nation to maintain Cherokee as a living language. Because they are within the Cherokee Nation tribal jurisdiction area, hospitals and health centers such as the Three Rivers Health Center in Muscogee, Oklahoma provide Cherokee language translation services.

Education

In 2008 the Cherokee Nation initiated a ten-year language preservation plan that involved growing new fluent speakers of the Cherokee language from childhood on up through school immersion programs, as well as a collaborative community effort to continue to use the language at home. This plan was part of an ambitious goal that in 50 years, 80 percent or more of the Cherokee people will be fluent in the language. The Cherokee Preservation Foundation has invested $4.5 million into opening schools, training teachers, and developing curricula for language education, as well as initiating community gatherings where the language can be actively used. They have accomplished: "Curriculum development, teaching materials and teacher training for a total immersion program for children, beginning when they are preschoolers, that enables them to learn Cherokee as their first language. The participating children and their parents learn to speak and read together. The Tribe operates the Kituwah Academy". Formed in 2006, the Kituwah Preservation & Education Program (KPEP) on the Qualla Boundary focuses on language immersion programs for children from birth to fifth grade, developing cultural resources for the general public and community language programs to foster the Cherokee language among adults.

There is also a Cherokee language immersion school in Tahlequah, Oklahoma that educates students from pre-school through eighth grade. A second campus was added in November 2021, when the school purchased Greasy School in Greasy, Oklahoma, located in southern Adair County ten miles south of Stilwell. Situated in the largest area of Cherokee speakers in the world, the opportunity for that campus is for students to spend the day in an immersion school and then return to a Cherokee-speaking home.

Several universities offer Cherokee as a second language, including the University of Oklahoma, Northeastern State University, and Western Carolina University. Western Carolina University (WCU) has partnered with the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI) to promote and restore the language through the school's Cherokee Studies program, which offers classes in and about the language and culture of the Cherokee Indians. WCU and the EBCI have initiated a ten-year language revitalization plan consisting of: (1) a continuation of the improvement and expansion of the EBCI Atse Kituwah Cherokee Language Immersion School, (2) continued development of Cherokee language learning resources, and (3) building of Western Carolina University programs to offer a more comprehensive language training curriculum.

In November 2022, the tribe opened a $20 million language center in a 52,000 sq ft (4,800 m²) building near its headquarters in Tahlequah. The immersion facility, which has classes for youth to adults, features no English signage: even the exit signs feature a pictograph of a person running for the door rather than the English word.

The Cherokee Nation has created language lessons on the online learning platform Memrise which contain "around 1,000 Cherokee words and phrases".

Phonology

The family of Iroquoian languages has a unique phonological inventory. Unlike most languages, the Cherokee inventory of consonants lacks the labial sounds and . It also lacks and . Cherokee does, however, have one labial consonant, , but it is rare, appearing in no more than ten native words. In fact, the Lower dialect does not produce at all. Instead, it uses .

In the case of , ⟨qw⟩ is often substituted, as in the name of the Cherokee Wikipedia, Wigiqwediya. Some words may contain sounds not reflected in the given phonology: for instance, the modern Oklahoma use of the loanword "automobile", with the and sounds of English.

Consonants

As with many Iroquoian languages, Cherokee's phonemic inventory is small. The consonants for North Carolina Cherokee are given in the table below. The consonants of all Iroquoian languages pattern so that they may be grouped as (oral) obstruents, sibilants, laryngeals, and resonants.

Orthography

There are two main competing orthographies, depending on how plain and aspirated stops (including affricates) are represented:

• In the d/t system, plain stops are represented by English voiced stops (d, g, gw, j, dl) and aspirated stops by English voiceless stops (t, k, kw, c, tl). This orthography is favored by native speakers.
• In the t/th system, plain stops are represented by voiceless stops instead, and aspirated stops by sequences of voiceless stops + h (th, kh, khw/kwh, ch, thl/tlh). This orthography is favored by linguists.

Another orthography, used in Holmes (1977), doesn't distinguish plain stops from aspirated stops for and and uses ts and qu for both modes. Spellings working from the syllabary rather than from the sounds often behave similarly, and being the only two stop series not having separate letters for plain and aspirated before any vowel in Sequoyah script. Ex: ᏌᏊ saquu , ᏆᎾ quana .

Vowels

There are six short vowels and six long vowels in the Cherokee inventory. As with all Iroquoian languages, this includes a nasalized vowel. In the case of Cherokee, the nasalized vowel is a mid central vowel usually represented as v and is pronounced , that is as a schwa vowel like the unstressed "a" in the English word "comma" plus the nasalization. It is similar to the nasalized vowel in the French word un which means "one".

is weakly rounded and often realized as .

Word-final vowels are short and nasalized, and receive an automatic high or high-falling tone: wado 'thank you'. They are often dropped in casual speech: gaáda 'dirt'. When deletion happens, trailing and are also deleted and any resulting long vowel is further shortened: uùgoohvv́ʔi becomes uùgoohv́ 'he saw it'.

Short vowels are devoiced before : digadóhdi . But due to the phonological rules of vowel deletion, laryngeal metathesis and laryngeal alternation (see below), this environment is relatively rare.

Sequences of two non-identical vowels are disallowed and the vowel clash must be resolved. There are four strategies depending on the phonological and morphological environments:

1. the first vowel is kept: uù-aduulíha becomes uùduulíha 'he wants',
2. the second vowel is kept: hi-ééga becomes hééga 'you're going',
3. an epenthetic consonant is inserted: jii-uudalééʔa becomes jiiyuudalééʔa,
4. they merge into a different vowel or tone quality.

These make the identification of each individual morpheme often a difficult task:

dúudaanv́vneelvv́ʔi

dee-

DIST-

ii-

ITER-

uu-

3B-

adaa(d)-

REFL-

nv́vneel

give:PFV

-vv́ʔi

-EXP

"he gave them right back to him"

déenasuúléésgo

dee-

DIST-

iinii-

1A.DU-

asuúléésg

wash.hands:IPFV

-o

-HAB

"you and I always wash our hands"

Tone

Cherokee distinguishes six pitch patterns or tones, using four pitch levels. Two tones are level (low, high) and appear on short or long vowels. The other four are contour tones (rising, falling, lowfall, highrise) and appear on long vowels only.

There is no academic consensus on the notation of tone and length, although in 2011 a project began to document the use of tones in Cherokee to improve language instruction. Below are the main conventions, along with the standardized IPA notation.

• The low tone is the default, unmarked tone.
• The high tone is the marked tone. Some sources of high tone apply to the mora, others to the syllable. Complex morphophonological rules govern whether it can spread one mora to the left, to the right or at all. It has both lexical and morphological functions.
• The rising and falling tones are secondary tones, i.e. combinations of low and high tones, deriving from moraic high tones and from high tone spread.
• The lowfall tone mainly derives from glottal stop deletion after a long vowel, but also has important morphological functions (pronominal lowering, tonic/atonic alternation, laryngeal alternation).
• The superhigh tone, also called highfall by Montgomery-Anderson, has a distinctive morphosyntactical function, primarily appearing on adjectives, nouns derived from verbs, and on subordinate verbs. It is mobile and falls on the rightmost long vowel. If the final short vowel is dropped and the superhigh tone becomes in word-final position, it is shortened and pronounced like a slightly higher final tone (notated as a̋ in most orthographies). There can only be one superhigh tone per word, a constraint not shared by the other tones. For these reasons, this contour exhibits some accentual properties and has been referred to as an accent (or stress) in the literature.

While the tonal system is undergoing a gradual simplification in many areas, it remains important in meaning and is still held strongly by many, especially older, speakers. The syllabary displays neither tone nor vowel length, but as stated earlier regarding the paucity of minimal pairs, real cases of ambiguity are rare. The same goes for transliterated Cherokee (osiyo for , dohitsu for , etc.), which is rarely written with any tone markers, except in dictionaries. Native speakers can tell the difference between written words based solely on context.

Orthography

Cherokee is written in an 85-character syllabary invented by Sequoyah (also known as Guest or George Gist). Many of the letters resemble the Latin letters they derive from, but have completely unrelated sound values; Sequoyah had seen English, Hebrew, and Greek writing but did not know how to read them.

Two other scripts used to write Cherokee are a simple Latin transliteration and a more precise system with diacritical marks.

Description

Each of the characters represents one syllable, as in the Japanese kana and the Bronze Age Greek Linear B writing systems. The first six characters represent isolated vowel syllables. Characters for combined consonant and vowel syllables then follow. It is recited from left to right, top to bottom.

The charts below show the syllabary as arranged by Samuel Worcester along with his commonly used transliterations. He played a key role in the development of Cherokee printing from 1828 until his death in 1859.

Unicode

Cherokee was added to the Unicode Standard in September 1999 with the release of version 3.0.

Blocks

The main Unicode block for Cherokee is U+13A0–U+13FF. It contains the script's upper-case syllables as well as six lower-case syllables:

The rest of the lower-case syllables are encoded at U+AB70–ABBF:

Fonts and digital platform support

A single Cherokee Unicode font, Plantagenet Cherokee, is supplied with macOS, version 10.3 (Panther) and later. Windows Vista also includes a Cherokee font. Several free Cherokee fonts are available including Digohweli, Donisiladv, and Noto Sans Cherokee. Some pan-Unicode fonts, such as Code2000, Everson Mono, and GNU FreeFont, include Cherokee characters. The Cherokee Nation Language Technology Program supports "innovative solutions for the Cherokee language on all digital platforms including smartphones, laptops, desktops, tablets and social networks."

A commercial font, Phoreus Cherokee, published by TypeCulture, includes multiple weights and styles. Additionally, the typeface Laconia Cherokee is available from Tiro Typeworks and is available under a pay-what-you-want model for indigenous language fonts.

Grammar

Cherokee, like many Native American languages, is polysynthetic, meaning that many morphemes may be linked together to form a single word, which may be of great length. Cherokee verbs must contain at a minimum a pronominal prefix, a verb root, an aspect suffix, and a modal suffix, for a total of 17 verb tenses. They can also bear prepronominal prefixes, reflexive prefixes, and derivational suffixes. Given all possible combinations of affixes, each regular verb can have 21,262 inflected forms.

For example, the verb form gééga, 'I am going', has each of these elements:

The pronominal prefix is g-, which indicates first person singular. The verb root is -éé-, 'to go.' The aspect suffix that this verb employs for the present-tense stem is -g-. The present-tense modal suffix for regular verbs in Cherokee is -a.

Cherokee makes three number distinctions on pronouns: singular, dual and plural. It does not make gender distinction, but does distinguish animacy in third person pronouns. Cherokee also makes the distinction between inclusive and exclusive pronouns in the first person dual and plural. There is no distinction between dual and plural in the 3rd person. This makes a total of 10 persons.

The following is the conjugation of this verb form in all 10 persons.

The translation uses the present progressive ('at this time I am going'). Cherokee differentiates between progressive ('I am going') and habitual ('I go') more than English does. For the habitual, the aspectual prefix is -g- "imperfective" or "incompletive" (here identical to present, but can vary for other verbs) and the modal prefix -óóʼi "habitual".

Pronouns and pronominal prefixes

Like many Native American languages, Cherokee has many pronominal prefixes that can index both subject and object. Pronominal prefixes always appear on verbs and can also appear on adjectives and nouns. There are two separate words which function as pronouns: aya 'I, me' and nihi 'you'.

Compound pronouns

A Cherokee pronoun's number marks not only the agent of a verb, but often the object as well. This is the case if the depending object was already mentioned and would be substituted by a separate pronoun in English as well. Contrary to English, animacy is marked but gender is not.

(These suffixes have to be treated in a CV syllabary structure.) Set I and II join here except if written A | B.

Some prefixes are the same, even though they mean their opposite. Understanding is ensured by regular stem changes within the verb.

Shape classifiers in verbs

Some Cherokee verbs require special classifiers which denote a physical property of the direct object. Only around 20 common verbs require one of these classifiers (such as the equivalent of 'hold'). The classifiers can be grouped into five categories:

• Live
• Flexible (most common)
• Long (narrow, not flexible)
• Indefinite (solid, heavy relative to size), also used as default category
• Liquid (or container of)

Example:

There have been reports that the youngest speakers of Cherokee are using only the indefinite forms, suggesting a decline in usage or full acquisition of the system of shape classification. Cherokee is the only Iroquoian language with this type of classificatory verb system, leading linguists to reanalyze it as a potential remnant of a noun incorporation system in Proto-Iroquoian. However, given the non-productive nature of noun incorporation in Cherokee, other linguists have suggested that classificatory verbs are the product of historical contact between Cherokee and non-Iroquoian languages, and instead that the noun incorporation system in Northern Iroquoian languages developed later.

Word order

All orderings between subjects, verbs, and objects are possible in Cherokee sentences, but word order preferences are influenced by a number of factors. Some preferences are determined by information structure; items that express contrast with alternatives generally precede other arguments, and items that express new information typically precede those that refer to entities already in the conversation. Word order is also influenced by thematic role, such that agent arguments of transitive sentences (subjects) typically precede theme arguments (objects). Verbs typically occur either at the end of the sentence or followed by exactly one phrase; it is highly uncommon to find two phrases following the verb in a single sentence. In copular sentences, the subject complement must precede the copular verb. Negative sentences have a different word order.

Within the nominal expression, some relative orders are fixed, while others are flexible. Demonstratives, such as ᎾᏍᎩ nasgi ('that') or ᎯᎠ hia ('this'), occur at the beginning of noun phrases. Numerals follow demonstratives, and precede both nouns and adjectives. Adjectives may either precede or follow nouns. Relative clauses follow the nouns that they modify. Adverbs precede the verbs that they are modifying. For example, 'she's speaking loudly' is ᎠᏍᏓᏯ ᎦᏬᏂᎭ asdaya gawoniha (literally, 'loud she's-speaking').

In affirmative present tense sentences, no verb is required to express a copular, predicative relationship between two noun phrases. In such a case, word order is flexible. For example, Ꮎ ᎠᏍᎦᏯ ᎠᎩᏙᏓ na asgaya agidoda ('that man is my father'). Adjectives can also be used predicatively with a noun phrase subject, as in ᎠᎩᏙᏓ ᎤᏔᎾ agidoda utana ('my father is big').

Vocabulary

Numbers

Cherokee uses Arabic numerals (0–9). The Cherokee council voted not to adopt Sequoyah's numbering system. Sequoyah created individual symbols for 1–20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, and 100 as well as a symbol for three zeros for numbers in the thousands, and a symbol for six zeros for numbers in the millions. These last two symbols, representing ",000" and ",000,000", are made up of two separate symbols each. They have a symbol in common, which could be used as a zero in itself.

Days

Months

Colors

Word creation

The polysynthetic nature of the Cherokee language enables the language to develop new descriptive words in Cherokee to reflect or express new concepts. Some good examples are ᏗᏘᏲᎯᎯ (ditiyohihi, 'he argues repeatedly and on purpose with a purpose') corresponding to 'attorney' and ᏗᏓᏂᏱᏍᎩ (didaniyisgi, 'the final catcher' or 'he catches them finally and conclusively') for 'policeman'.

Other words have been adopted from another language such as the English word gasoline, which in Cherokee is ᎦᏐᎵᏁ (gasoline). Other words were adopted from the languages of tribes who settled in Oklahoma in the early 1900s. One interesting and humorous example is the name of Nowata, Oklahoma, deriving from nowata, a Delaware word for 'welcome' (more precisely the Delaware word is nuwita which can mean 'welcome' or 'friend' in the Delaware languages). The white settlers of the area used the name Nowata for the township, and local Cherokee, being unaware that the word had its origins in the Delaware language, called the town ᎠᎹᏗᎧᏂᎬᎾᎬᎾ (Amadikanigvnagvna) which means 'the water is all gone gone from here' — i.e. 'no water'.

Other examples of adopted words are ᎧᏫ (kawi) for 'coffee' and ᏩᏥ (watsi) for 'watch'; which led to ᎤᏔᎾ ᏩᏥ (utana watsi, 'big watch') for clock.

Meaning expansion can be illustrated by the words for 'warm' and 'cold', which can be also extended to mean 'south' and 'north'. Around the time of the American Civil War, they were further extended to US party labels, Democratic and Republican, respectively.

Samples

From the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

ᏂᎦᏓ ᎠᏂᏴᏫ ᏂᎨᎫᏓᎸᎾ ᎠᎴ ᎤᏂᎶᏱ ᎤᎾᏕᎿ ᏚᏳᎧᏛ ᎨᏒᎢ.

Nigada aniyvwi nigeguda'lvna ale unihloyi unadehna duyukdv gesv'i.

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.

ᎨᏥᏁᎳ ᎤᎾᏓᏅᏖᏗ ᎠᎴ ᎤᏃᎵᏍᏗ

Gejinela unadanvtehdi ale unohlisdi

They are endowed with reason and conscience

ᎠᎴ ᏌᏊ ᎨᏒ ᏧᏂᎸᏫᏍᏓᏁᏗ ᎠᎾᏟᏅᏢ ᎠᏓᏅᏙ ᎬᏗ.

ale sagwu gesv junilvwisdanedi anahldinvdlv adanvdo gvhdi.

and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.