The Cherokee syllabary is a
syllabary
In the Linguistics, linguistic study of Written language, written languages, a syllabary is a set of grapheme, written symbols that represent the syllables or (more frequently) mora (linguistics), morae which make up words.
A symbol in a syllaba ...
invented by
Sequoyah
Sequoyah ( ; , , or , , ; 1770 – August 1843), also known as George Gist or George Guess, was a Native American polymath and Constructed script, neographer of the Cherokee Nation.
In 1821, Sequoyah completed his Cherokee syllabary, enabl ...
in the late 1810s and early 1820s to write the
Cherokee language
file:Cherokee Speakers by County, 2000.png, 350px, Number of speakers
file:Lang Status 20-CR.svg, Cherokee is classified as Critically Endangered by UNESCO's ''Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger''
Cherokee or Tsalagi (, ) is an endangere ...
. His creation of the syllabary is particularly noteworthy as he was
illiterate until its creation. He first experimented with
logogram
In a written language, a logogram (from Ancient Greek 'word', and 'that which is drawn or written'), also logograph or lexigraph, is a written character that represents a semantic component of a language, such as a word or morpheme. Chine ...
s, but his system later developed into the syllabary. In his system, each symbol represents a
syllable
A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of speech sounds, such as within a word, typically defined by linguists as a ''nucleus'' (most often a vowel) with optional sounds before or after that nucleus (''margins'', which are ...
rather than a single
phoneme
A phoneme () is any set of similar Phone (phonetics), speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible Phonetics, phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word fr ...
; the 85 (originally 86) characters provide a suitable method for writing Cherokee. The letters resemble characters from other scripts, such as
Latin
Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...
,
Greek,
Cyrillic
The Cyrillic script ( ) is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking countries in Southeastern Europe, Ea ...
, and
Glagolitic
The Glagolitic script ( , , ''glagolitsa'') is the oldest known Slavic alphabet. It is generally agreed that it was created in the 9th century for the purpose of translating liturgical texts into Old Church Slavonic by Saints Cyril and Methodi ...
, but are not used to represent the same sounds.
History
Early history

Around 1809, impressed by the "talking leaves" of European written languages,
Sequoyah
Sequoyah ( ; , , or , , ; 1770 – August 1843), also known as George Gist or George Guess, was a Native American polymath and Constructed script, neographer of the Cherokee Nation.
In 1821, Sequoyah completed his Cherokee syllabary, enabl ...
began work to create a writing system for the Cherokee language. After attempting to create a
character for each word, Sequoyah realized this would be too difficult and eventually created characters to represent syllables. He worked on the syllabary for twelve years before completion and dropped or modified most of the characters he originally created.
After the syllabary was completed in the early 1820s, it achieved almost instantaneous popularity and spread rapidly throughout Cherokee society. By 1825, the majority of Cherokees could read and write in their newly developed orthography.
Some of Sequoyah's most learned contemporaries immediately understood that the syllabary was a great invention. For example, when
Albert Gallatin, a politician and trained linguist, saw a copy of Sequoyah's syllabary, he believed it was superior to the English alphabet in that literacy could be easily achieved for Cherokee at a time when only one-third of English-speaking people achieved the same goal. He recognized that even though the Cherokee student must learn 85 characters instead of 26 for English, the Cherokee could read immediately after learning all the symbols. The Cherokee student could accomplish in a few weeks what students of English writing might require two years to achieve.
In 1828, the order of the characters in a chart and the shapes of the characters were modified by Cherokee author and editor
Elias Boudinot to adapt the syllabary to printing presses.
The 86th character was dropped entirely. Following these changes, the syllabary was adopted by the ''
Cherokee Phoenix'' newspaper, later ''
Cherokee Advocate'', followed by the ''Cherokee Messenger'', a bilingual paper printed in
Indian Territory
Indian Territory and the Indian Territories are terms that generally described an evolving land area set aside by the Federal government of the United States, United States government for the relocation of Native Americans in the United States, ...
in the mid-19th century.
In 1834,
Samuel Worcester made changes to several characters in order to improve the readability of Cherokee text. Most notably, he inverted the ''do'' character (Ꮩ) so that it could not be confused with the ''go'' character (Ꭺ). Otherwise, the characters remained remarkably invariant until the advent of new typesetting technologies in the 20th century.
Later developments

In the 1960s, the Cherokee Phoenix Press began publishing literature in the Cherokee syllabary, including the ''Cherokee Singing Book''. A Cherokee syllabary typewriter ball was developed for the
IBM Selectric
The IBM Selectric (a portmanteau of "selective" and "electric") was a highly successful line of electric typewriters introduced by IBM on 31 July 1961.
Instead of the "basket" of individual typebars that swung up to strike the ribbon and page ...
in the late 1970s. Computer fonts greatly expanded Cherokee writers' ability to publish in Cherokee. In 2010, a Cherokee keyboard cover was developed by
Roy Boney, Jr. and
Joseph Erb, facilitating more rapid typing in Cherokee. The keyboard cover is now used by students in the
Cherokee Nation
The Cherokee Nation ( or ) is the largest of three list of federally recognized tribes, federally recognized tribes of Cherokees in the United States. It includes people descended from members of the Cherokee Nation (1794–1907), Old Cheroke ...
Immersion School, where all coursework is written in syllabary.
[
In August 2010, the Oconaluftee Institute for Cultural Arts in Cherokee, North Carolina acquired a letterpress and had the Cherokee syllabary recast to begin printing one-of-a-kind fine art books and prints in syllabary.]["Letterpress arrives at OICA"](_blank)
''Southwestern Community College'' (retrieved 21 Nov 2010) Artists Jeff Marley and Frank Brannon completed a collaborative project on October 19, 2013, in which they printed using Cherokee syllabary type from Southwestern Community College in the print shop at New Echota. This was the first time syllabary type has been used at New Echota since 1835.
The syllabary is finding increasingly diverse usage today, from books, newspapers, and websites to the street signs of Tahlequah, Oklahoma, and Cherokee, North Carolina. An increasing corpus of children's literature is printed in Cherokee to meet the needs of students in Cherokee language immersion schools in Oklahoma and North Carolina.
Possible influence on Liberian Vai syllabary
In the 1960s, evidence emerged suggesting that the Cherokee syllabary of North America provided a model for the design of the Vai syllabary in Liberia. The Vai syllabary emerged about 1832/33. This was at a time when American missionaries were working to use the Cherokee syllabary as a model for writing Liberian languages. Another link appears to have been Cherokee who emigrated to Liberia after the invention of the Cherokee syllabary (which in its early years spread rapidly among the Cherokee) but before the inventions of the Vai syllabary. One such man, Austin Curtis, married into a prominent Vai family and became an important Vai chief himself. It is perhaps not coincidence that the "inscription on a house" that drew the world's attention to the existence of the Vai script was in fact on the home of Curtis, a Cherokee. There also appears to be a connection between an early form of written Bassa and the earlier Cherokee syllabary.
Description
The modern writing system consists of 85 characters, each representing a distinct syllable
A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of speech sounds, such as within a word, typically defined by linguists as a ''nucleus'' (most often a vowel) with optional sounds before or after that nucleus (''margins'', which are ...
. The first six characters represent isolated vowel syllables. Characters for combined consonant and vowel syllables then follow.
The charts below show the syllabary in recitation order, left to right, top to bottom, 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. The Latin letter 'v' in the transcriptions, seen in the last column, represents the nasal mid-central vowel, .
Notes:
The Cherokee character () has a different orientation in old documents, an upside-down letter V, flipped as compared to modern documents.
There is also a handwritten cursive form of the syllabary; notably, the handwritten glyphs bear little resemblance to the printed forms.
Detailed considerations
The phonetic values of these characters do not equate directly to those represented by the letters of the Latin script. Some characters represent two distinct phonetic values (actually heard as different syllables), while others may represent multiple variations of the same syllable. Not all phonemic distinctions of the spoken language are represented:
* Voiced consonants are generally not distinguished from their non-voiced counterpart. For example, while + vowel syllables are mostly differentiated from + vowel by use of different glyph
A glyph ( ) is any kind of purposeful mark. In typography, a glyph is "the specific shape, design, or representation of a character". It is a particular graphical representation, in a particular typeface, of an element of written language. A ...
s, syllables beginning with are all conflated with those beginning with .
* Long vowels are not distinguished from short vowels. However, in more recent technical literature, length of vowels can actually be indicated using a colon, and other disambiguation methods for consonants have been suggested.
* Syllables ending in vowels, ''h'', or a glottal stop are not differentiated. For example, the single symbol is used to represent both as in , meaning "six" (), and as in , meaning "fishhook" ().
* There is no regular rule for representing consonant clusters. When consonants other than ''s, h,'' or glottal stop arise in clusters with other consonants, a vowel must be inserted, chosen either arbitrarily or for etymological reasons (reflecting an underlying etymological vowel, see vowel deletion for instance). For example, () represents the word , meaning "small (pl.), babies". The consonant cluster ''ns'' is broken down by insertion of the vowel ''a'', and is spelled as . The vowel is etymological as is composed of the morphemes , where ''a'' is part of the root. The vowel is included in the transliteration, but is not pronounced.
* Tones are not marked in the script.
As with some other writing systems, proficient speakers can distinguish words by context.
If a labial plosive appears in a borrowed word or name, it is written using the ''qu'' row. This ~ correspondence is a known linguistic phenomenon that exists elsewhere (cf. P-Celtic
The Gallo-Brittonic languages, also known as the P-Celtic languages, are a proposed subdivision of the Celtic languages containing the languages of Ancient Gaul (both ''Gallia Celtica, Celtica'' and ''Belgica'') and Celtic Britain, which share ce ...
, Osco-Umbrian). The ''l'' and ''tl'' rows are similarly used for borrowings containing ''r'' or ''tr/dr'', respectively, and ''s'' (including within ''ts'') can represent /s/, /ʃ/, /z/, or /ʒ/, as indicated in the above word ''juunsdi̋''.
Transliteration issues
Some Cherokee words pose a problem for transliteration software because they contain adjacent pairs of single-letter symbols that (without special provisions) would be combined when doing the back-conversion from Latin script to Cherokee. Here are a few examples:
For these examples, the back conversion is likely to join ''s-a'' as ''sa'' or ''s-i'' as ''si'', as the consonant ''s'' can be written either with its own isolated glyph, or combined with a following vowel—but the vowel itself does not require being attached to a consonant. One solution is to use a middle dot to separate the two, While some use an apostrophe instead, apostrophes are also used to represent a glottal stop
The glottal stop or glottal plosive is a type of consonantal sound used in many Speech communication, spoken languages, produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract or, more precisely, the glottis. The symbol in the International Phonetic ...
in Cherokee.
Other Cherokee words contain character pairs that entail overlapping transliteration sequences. For example:
* transliterates as , yet so does . The former is , the latter is .
* transliterates as , yet so does . The former is , the latter is .
If the Latin script is parsed from left to right, longest match first, then without special provisions, the back conversion would be wrong for the latter. There are several similar examples involving these character combinations: .
A further problem encountered in transliterating Cherokee is that there are some pairs of different Cherokee words that transliterate to the same word in the Latin script. For example:
* and both transliterate to
* and both transliterate to
Without special provision, a round trip conversion may change to and change to .
Character orders
There are two main character orders for the Cherokee script. The usual order for Cherokee runs across the rows of the syllabary chart from left to right, top to bottom—this is the one used in the Unicode block. It has also been alphabetized based on the six columns of the syllabary chart from top to bottom, left to right.
Numerals
Modern Cherokee generally uses Arabic numerals
The ten Arabic numerals (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9) are the most commonly used symbols for writing numbers. The term often also implies a positional notation number with a decimal base, in particular when contrasted with Roman numera ...
. In the late 1820s, several years after the introduction and adoption of his syllabary, Sequoyah proposed a set of number signs for Cherokee; however, these were never adopted and never typeset. In 2012, the Cherokee Language Consortium agreed to begin using Sequoyah's numerals in some instances.
Sequoyah developed unique characters for 1 through 19, and then characters for the "tens" of 20 through 100. Additional symbols were used to note thousands and millions, and Sequoyah also used a final symbol to mark the end of a number.[ The glyphs for 1 through 20 can be grouped into groups of five that have a visual similarity to each other (1–5, 6–10, 11–15, and 16–20). The Cherokee Language Consortium has created an additional symbol for zero along with symbols for billions and trillions.][ As of Unicode 13.0, Cherokee numerals are not encoded within Unicode.
Sequoyah's proposed ]numeral system
A numeral system is a writing system for expressing numbers; that is, a mathematical notation for representing numbers of a given set, using digits or other symbols in a consistent manner.
The same sequence of symbols may represent differe ...
has been described as having a "ciphered-additive structure," using combinations of the characters for 1 through 9 with the characters for 20 through 100 to create larger numbers. For example, instead of writing 64, the Cherokee numerals for 60 and 4 (
) would be written together. To write 10 through 19, unique characters for each number are employed. For numbers larger than 100, the system takes on features of a multiplicative-additive system, with the digits for 1 through being placed before the hundred, thousand, or million sign to indicate large numbers;[ for example, for 504, the Cherokee numerals for 5, 100, and 4 (]
) would be written together.
Classes
Cherokee language classes typically begin with a transliteration of Cherokee into Roman letters, only later incorporating the syllabary. The Cherokee language classes offered through Haskell Indian Nations University, Northeastern State University,[ the ]University of Oklahoma
The University of Oklahoma (OU) is a Public university, public research university in Norman, Oklahoma, United States. Founded in 1890, it had existed in Oklahoma Territory near Indian Territory for 17 years before the two territories became the ...
, the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma
The University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma (USAO) is a public liberal arts college in Chickasha, Oklahoma. It is the only public college in Oklahoma with a strictly liberal arts–focused curriculum and is a member of the Council of Publ ...
, Western Carolina University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC, UNC–Chapel Hill, or simply Carolina) is a public university, public research university in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States. Chartered in 1789, the university first began enrolli ...
, and the immersion elementary schools offered by the Cherokee Nation and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, such as New Kituwah Academy, all teach the syllabary. The fine arts degree program at Southwestern Community College incorporates the syllabary in its printmaking classes.[
]
Unicode
Cherokee was added to the Unicode
Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...
standard in September 1999, with the release of version 3.0. The character repertoire was extended to include a complete set of lowercase Cherokee letters as well as the archaic character ().
On June 17, 2015, with the release of version 8.0, the Unicode Consortium encoded a lowercase version of the script and redefined Cherokee as a bicameral script. Typists would often set Cherokee with two different point sizes so as to mark beginnings of sentences and given names (as in the Latin alphabet). Handwritten Cherokee also shows a difference in lower- and uppercase letters, such as descenders and ascenders. Lowercase Cherokee has already been encoded in the font Everson Mono.
Blocks
The first Unicode block for Cherokee is U+13A0–U+13FF. It contains all 86 uppercase letters, together with six lowercase letters:
The Cherokee Supplement block is U+AB70–U+ABBF. It contains the remaining 80 lowercase letters.
Fonts
A single Cherokee Unicode font, Plantagenet Cherokee, is supplied with macOS
macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...
, version 10.3 (Panther) and later. Windows Vista
Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, released five years earlier, which was then the longest time span between successive releases of Microsoft W ...
also includes a Cherokee font. Windows 10 replaced Plantagenet Cherokee with Gadugi after the Cherokee language term for "working together".
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. A commercial font, Phoreus Cherokee, published by TypeCulture, includes multiple weights and styles.
See also
* Canadian Aboriginal syllabics
Canadian syllabic writing, or simply syllabics, is a family of writing systems used in a number of indigenous Canadian languages of the Algonquian languages, Algonquian, Eskimo–Aleut languages, Inuit, and (formerly) Athabaskan languages, A ...
* Cree syllabics
Cree syllabics are the versions of Canadian Aboriginal syllabics used to write Cree language, Cree dialects, including the original syllabics system created for Cree and Ojibwe language, Ojibwe. There are two main varieties of syllabics for Cre ...
Notes
References
Bibliography
* Bender, Margaret. 2002. ''Signs of Cherokee Culture: Sequoyah's Syllabary in Eastern Cherokee Life''. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
* Bender, Margaret. 2008. Indexicality, voice, and context in the distribution of Cherokee scripts. ''International Journal of the Sociology of Language'' 192:91–104.
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Further reading
*
External links
* .
Learning to Design a Cherokee Syllabary with Mark Jamra
– Cooper Union lecture on sociohistorical background behind Sequoyah's invention, and attempts in designing modern Cherokee typefaces
{{Language orthographies
Syllabary writing systems
Syllabary
In the Linguistics, linguistic study of Written language, written languages, a syllabary is a set of grapheme, written symbols that represent the syllables or (more frequently) mora (linguistics), morae which make up words.
A symbol in a syllaba ...
Writing systems of the Americas
1809 introductions
Writing systems introduced in the 19th century