Cherokee Language

Cherokee language, Cherokee name Tsalagi Gawonihisdi, North American Indian language, a member of the Iroquoian family, spoken by the Cherokee (Tsalagi) people originally inhabiting Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Cherokee was one of the first American Indian languages to have a system of writing devised for it—a syllabary, so called because each of the graphic symbols represents a syllable.

front page of the Cherokee Phoenix

Sequoyah (also called George Guess or George Gist), the half-Cherokee Indian who developed the Cherokee syllabary from 1809 to 1821, began by trying to devise a logographic alphabet (one graphic symbol for one word), though that eventually proved to be too unwieldy. He next determined to create characters for each syllable. This he did, producing a handwritten system with little inspiration from English. Ultimately, his syllabary included 86 symbols.

The Cherokee Phoenix (Tsalagi Tsulehisanvhi), the Cherokee Nation’s first official newspaper, appeared on February 21, 1828. Printed with English and Cherokee side-by-side, it was the first North American Indian newspaper to be published in an indigenous language, as well as the first North American bilingual newspaper. When the Cherokee Nation first purchased a printing press, some of Sequoyah’s written characters were replaced by analogues from the Roman (Latin) alphabet or were created out of modified Roman letters for purposes of clarity, design, and aesthetics. That modified adaptation of the original script eventually replaced the original, and it became the primary writing system used by native Cherokee speakers.

That writing system was taken by the Cherokees who went to Oklahoma over the course of the 1830s and was used in official documents and newspapers there. Although its public use gradually declined over the next 100 years, it continued to appear in private correspondence, renderings of the Bible, and descriptions of Indian medicine.

Assimilation soon became the policy of the United States government. Public use of the Cherokee language—and, indeed, any indigenous language—was discouraged to the point of physical punishment in government-run Indian boarding schools, with the result of a rapid decline of native speakers. Beginning in the late 20th century, however, a variety of language-revitalization programs became available in all three federally recognized sovereign Cherokee tribal entities as well as online.