About the Cherokee Language

• The Cherokee language contains many morphemes and is considered poly-synthetic by linguists.
• These morphemes are the smallest linguistic metrics that provide the given language’s meaning.  Similar to words in an English sentence.
• Modern words of today can easily be incorporated into the language as many of the words mean the same thing in Cherokee as they do in English.
• Cherokee contains the  Giduwa dialect which is spoken by other Eastern Cherokee and the Otali dialect taken from the English.

About the Cherokee Written Language

• George Guess, Chief Sequoyah,  is accredited for creating the written language of the Cherokee Indians.
• The Cherokee syllabary was introduced in to the Cherokee society in 1819.
• It is a syllabary writing system and is written left to right horizontally.
• The syllabary is used to write the Cherokee Language which is a a Southern Iroquoian language which is still spoken today in North Carolina and Oklahoma by approximately  22,500 people.
• The language originally contained 200 different symbols and was later reduced to 86 different symbols.
• Sequoyah himself taught the Cherokee writing system to fellow Cherokees, his daughter, Ayoka, was his first student.
• By the 1830’s about 90% of the Cherokee were literate and could communicate using this form of written language.
• Over the next 100 years various textbooks, novels and papers where written and translated into the Cherokee language.
• The syllabary is still in use today.  Schools and Colleges have taken up the effort to preserve the Cherokee language and the Cherokee syllabary and several classes are offered for those who wish to learn.
• The Cherokee language is  the second most used Native American language and it is still being developed.

Learning Cherokee

Cherokee Language Resources

Over the next few week we provide several resources to help you learn the Cherokee Language.