Cherokee Language

Around 1809, a "mixed-blood" Cherokee named Sequoyah (who also went by George Gist or "Guess") started developing a written form of the Cherokee language. By 1821, he completed a syllable-based alphabet of 86 characters. The new alphabet was eventually adopted by the Cherokee Council in 1826. The council used it in a newspaper called The Cherokee Phoenix. This bilingual newspaper circulated throughout the Cherokee Nation, as well as parts of the United States and Europe. The printing office also printed thousands of pages of other publications in this new alphabet, including the Bible, hymn books, and a novel.

 

Sequoyah was born to a European fur trader and a Cherokee woman. He never learned English. He felt part of White America's power over the Cherokee was from their ability to communicate long distances with their written languages. This led him to experiment with ways to write down the otherwise spoken-only Cherokee language.

By trade, Sequoyah was a painter and a silversmith. The written language experiments were put on hold as he served with the U.S. Army in the Creek War of 1813-1814. After the war, he married a Cherokee woman and they had a daughter. His daughter quickly learned the new written language, and helped her father teach it to other Cherokees.

His new written language isn't in the form of an alphabet like most languages. Rather, it's called a Cherokee syllabary. Most syllabary characters represent a consonant and a vowel. Read left to right, it represents all the sounds needed to reproduce the oral language in paper form.

Both the oral and written Cherokee languages are on the rise today. About 2,000 people speak it fluently, with approximately another 11,000 partial speakers.

 

Try your hand at the Cherokee language!

• Hello = ᎣᏏᏲ = O si yo

• Goodbye = ᏤᎾᏓᎪᎲᎢ = Tse nu da go hv i

• Cherokee = ᏣᎳᎩ = Tsa la gi'

• Sequoyah = ᏏᏉᏯ = Si quo ya