Cherokee Language

Cherokee is a Native American language. Cherokee became its own distinct language roughly thirty-five hundred years ago but did not have a written language until the early nineteenth century. Sequoyah, the Cherokee who invented the written language, first taught his six-year-old daughter how to read and write his system. At first, many Cherokee were hesitant to use the written symbols. In time, however, many of the leading figures in the community accepted Sequoyah's invention, recognizing its importance and influence as well as the possibility of recording important speeches, songs, and events in their own native language.

History and Classification

The Cherokee language is classified as AmerInd and belongs to the Iroquoian branch of the Hokan-Siouan linguistic family. It has seventeen meaningful sounds, eleven of which are consonants and six are vowels. Cherokee is the only southern Iroquoian language and was historically spoken in the southern Appalachian Mountains of the United States.

Cherokee was classified into three dialects when the Europeans arrived in America that were based on geographical divisions. The Elati (Lower) dialect was spoken in northwestern South Carolina and Georgia. The Kituhwa (Middle) dialect was spoken in western North Carolina. The Otali (Overhill) dialect was widespread in eastern Tennessee, along the Hiwassee and Cheoah Rivers in North Carolina, in northeastern Alabama, and northwestern Georgia.

Around 1809, a Cherokee named Sequoyah, became interested in the way white settlers communicated through written symbols on paper. He began working with his native Cherokee oral language in an attempt to create a writing system. He recognized that eighty-five syllables were the foundation of spoken Cherokee, seventy-eight of which were consonant-vowel combinations, six were vowels, and one was the "s" consonant. He first experimented with logograms, but accounts show that he quickly became overwhelmed and frustrated by the number of signs that were required to work with Cherokee. Next, he created a cursive, handwritten syllabary, but it was very time-consuming and expensive to produce printed copies. By 1828, the written language had been refined to a system based on letters, symbols, and numerals from the Latin alphabet. Only two years later, 90 percent of Cherokee were literate in their own language, which was used in published books, religious texts, almanacs, and newspapers as well as personal correspondence and record keeping.

The Cherokee found themselves frequently on the wrong side of conflict, both by siding with the British during the American Revolution and with the Confederacy during the Civil War. Each time, the Cherokee lost more of their rights and territory; however, it was the discovery of gold in the early 1830s in the Cherokee's Georgia territory that escalated the tribe's removal process. After a small minority of Cherokee ceded the tribal lands, a majority group took the case to the US Supreme Court, winning on appeal. Ignoring this, the Andrew Jackson administration mustered military action against the Cherokee under the Indian Removal Act, forcibly relocating the tribe to Oklahoma.

In Oklahoma, the Cherokee Nation rebuilt their society, retaining their language and cultural identity. In 1906, Oklahoma entered statehood, leading to the dissolution of the Indian Territory and thus the Cherokee Nation. It was not until the 1970s that the Cherokee were successfully able to petition the United States government for permission to reform, and by the 1990s, their records indicated the tribe had more than three hundred thousand members.

In the twenty-first century, the Cherokee are one of the largest Native American tribes in the United States, and most of the members speak and are able to write in their indigenous language.

Geographic Distribution and Modern Usage

The Cherokee were originally from the Great Lakes region, but sometime before the sixteenth century, they relocated to the southern Appalachians. Their lands ranged across Alabama, Tennessee, North and South Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, and parts of Kentucky. The Cherokee territory drew the attention of entrepreneurial white colonists who worked to dispossess the tribe of traditional lands in order to settle the region themselves. Although the Cherokee argued against it, they were ultimately pushed out through military action. More than sixteen thousand Cherokee were forced to endure a thousand-mile trek that began in the winter of 1838 to Indian Territory in Oklahoma. More than four thousand Cherokee died during the trip, which became known as the Trail of Tears.

Some Cherokee remained in the Appalachians, hiding out in the mountains until 1849 when they settled on the Qualla reservation in North Carolina. However, the majority of the tribe was relocated to northeastern Oklahoma. In the twenty-first century, there are three federally recognized Cherokee communities: two in Oklahoma and one in North Carolina; however, Cherokee communities are also found in Alabama, Georgia, and several other states.

By 2000, there were more than 281,000 speakers of the Cherokee language. The Cherokee in northeastern Oklahoma speak the Overhill dialect, while around seven hundred speakers maintain the Middle dialect on the Qualla Boundary in North Carolina. The Lower dialect has been extinct since 1888; however, there are other minor variations of the Cherokee language used in various Cherokee communities. In Oklahoma, the language has become tonal, with three level tones: a rising tone and two falling tones.

Publications and educational opportunities in the Cherokee language are available. Courses in the language are taught in schools, colleges, universities, and online. Newspapers, websites, magazines, and books are all published in the Cherokee language, still using the same system devised by Sequoyah in the nineteenth century.

Bibliography

"Cherokee." Omniglot. Simon Ager. Web. 10 Sept. 2015. http://www.omniglot.com/writing/cherokee.htm

"Cherokee Indians." Indians.org. Indians.org. Web. 10 Sept. 2015. http://indians.org/articles/cherokee-indians.html

Dalby, Andrew. "Cherokee." Dictionary of Languages: The Definitive Reference to More than 400 Languages. London: A&C Black, 2004. Print.

Ehle, John. Trail of Tears. New York: Anchor Books, 1988. Print.

Hoxie, Frederick E. "Cherokee Language." Encyclopedia of North American Indians: Native American History, Culture, and Life from Paleo-Indians to the Present. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1996. Print.

"Language." Cherokee Nation. Cherokee Nation. Web. 10 Sept. 2015. http://www.cherokee.org/AboutTheNation/Language.aspx

Mackenzie, John. "Cherokee." Peoples, Nations, and Cultures: An A-Z of the Peoples of the World, Past and Present. London: Cassell, 2005. Print.