Cherokee language

Cherokee

ᏣᎳᎩ ᎦᏬᏂᎯᏍᏗ Tsalagi Gawonihisdi

Spoken in United States

Region Oklahoma and the Qualla Boundary, North Carolina

Native speakers 12,000 to 22,000^[1]

Language family

Iroquoian

Southern Iroquoian
- Cherokee

Writing system Cherokee syllabary, Latin alphabet

Language codes

ISO 639-2 chr

ISO 639-3 chr

Original distribution of the Cherokee language

Current distribution

This page contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters.

Cherokee (ᏣᎳᎩ ᎦᏬᏂᎯᏍᏗ, Tsalagi Gawonihisdi) is an Iroquoian language spoken by the Cherokee people which uses a unique syllabary writing system. It is the only Southern Iroquoian language that remains spoken.^[2] Cherokee is a polysynthetic language.

North American etymology

The North American origins and eventual English language form of "Cherokee" were researched by James Mooney in the nineteenth century. In his Myths of the Cherokee (1888) he reports:

"It first appears as Chalaque in the Portuguese narrative of De Soto's expedition, published originally in 1557, while we find Cheraqui in a French document of 1699, and Cherokee as an English form as early, at least, as 1708. The name has thus an authentic [sic] history of 360 years."^[3] Cherokee is also taught as a second-language in Northwest Georgia.

Modern dialects

Cherokee has three major dialects. The Lower dialect became extinct around 1900. The Middle or Kituhwa dialect is spoken by the Eastern band on the Qualla Boundary. The Overhill or Western dialect is spoken in Oklahoma.^[4] The Overhill dialect has an estimated 9000 speakers.^[5] The Lower dialect spoken by the inhabitants of the Lower Towns in the vicinity of the South Carolina–Georgia border had r as the liquid consonant in its inventory, while both the contemporary Kituhwa or Ani-kituwah dialect spoken in North Carolina and the Overhill dialects contain l. As such, the word "Cherokee" when spoken in the language is expressed as Tsalagi (pronounced Jah-la-gee, Cha-la-gee, or Cha-la-g or TSA la gi by giduwa dialect speakers) by native speakers.

Phonology

Cherokee only has one labial consonant, m–which is relatively new to the language. The language also lacks p and b. In the case of p, qu is often substituted (as in the name of Cherokee Wikipedia, Wi-gi-que-di-ya).

Consonants

The consonant inventory for North Carolina Cherokee is given in the table below. The consonants of all Iroquoian languages pattern so that they may be grouped as (oral) obstruents, sibilants, laryngeals, and resonants (Lounsbury 1978:337). Obstruents are non-distinctively aspirated when they precede h. There is some variation in how orthographies represent these allophones. The orthography used in the table represents the aspirated allophones as th, kh, and tsh. Another common orthography represents the unaspirated allophones as d, g, and dz and the aspirated allophones as t, k, and ts (Scancarelli 2005:359–62). The unaspirated plosives and affricate are optionally voiced intervocally. In other dialects, the affricate is a palatal (like ch in "church"), and a lateral affricate (like tl in "atlas") may also be present.

**North Carolina Cherokee consonants**
	Labial	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Plosive		t		k	ʔ
Affricate		ts
Fricative		s			h
Nasal	m	n
Approximant		l	j (y)	ɰ (w)

Vowels

There are six short vowels and six long vowels in the Cherokee inventory. As with all Iroquoian languages, this includes a nasalized vowel (Lounsbury 1978:337). In the case of Cherokee, the nasalized vowel is a schwa, which most orthographies represent as v and is pronounced [ɜ] as "u" in "but"; since it is nasal, it sounds rather like French un. Other vowels, when ending a word, are often nasalized. Vowels can be short or long.^[6]

	Front	Central	Back
Close	i iː		u uː
Mid	e eː	ə̃ ə̃ː	o oː
Open		a aː

Diphthongs

Cherokee has only one diphthong native to the language:

ai /ai/

Another exception to the phonology above is the modern Oklahoma use of the loanword "automobile," with the /ɔ/ sound and /b/ sound of English.

Tone

Cherokee is a pitch accent language with six tones, two of which are level (low, high) and the other four of which are contour (rising, falling, highfall, lowfall).^[7] While the tonal system is undergoing a gradual simplification in many areas, it remains important in meaning and is still held strongly by many, especially older, speakers. The syllabary, however, does not display tone, and real meaning discrepancies are rare within the native-language Cherokee-speaking community. The same goes for transliterated Cherokee ("osiyo", "dohitsu", etc.), which is rarely written with any tone markers, except in dictionaries. Native speakers can tell the difference between tone-distinguished words by context.

Tone Inventory

The tone name in the left-hand column displays the labels most recently used in studies of the language.^[8] The second represents the tone in standardized IPA.

Tone Name	IPA
Low	˨
High	˦
Rising	˨˦
Falling	˥˩
Highfall	˥˧
Lowfall	˧˩

Tone Environments

The high and low tones can appear on both long and short vowels in Cherokee,^[9] and remain at the same pitch throughout the duration of the vowel sound. Contour tones in Cherokee appear only in underlying long vowels.^[10] At the ends of words in colloquial speech, there is a tendency to drop off a long vowel into a short vowel; this results in the highfall tone being produced as a high tone in faster speech. ^[11]

Highfall

Highfall has a unique grammatical usage, primarily appearing with adjectives and adverbials along with most nouns derived from verbs. It only appears in verbs subordinate to another element of the sentence. When a highfall appears on a verb it changes the verbs' role in the sentence, typically to one of four main categories: agentive derivation, modal, object derivation, or subordination.^[12]

Grammar

Cherokee, like many Native American languages, is polysynthetic, meaning that many morphemes may be linked together to form a single word, which may be of great length. Cherokee verbs, the most important word type, must contain as a minimum a pronominal prefix, a verb root, an aspect suffix, and a modal suffix.^[13] For example, the verb form ge:ga, "I am going," has each of these elements:

Verb form ge:ga
g- e: -g -a

PRONOMINAL PREFIX VERB ROOT "to go" ASPECT SUFFIX MODAL SUFFIX

Verb form **ge:ga**
g-	e:	-g	-a
PRONOMINAL PREFIX	VERB ROOT "to go"	ASPECT SUFFIX	MODAL SUFFIX

The pronominal prefix is g-, which indicates first person singular. The verb root is -e, "to go." The aspect suffix that this verb employs for the present-tense stem is -g-. The present-tense modal suffix for regular verbs in Cherokee is -a

The following is a conjugation in the present tense of the verb to go.^[14] Please note that there is no distinction between dual and plural in the 3rd person.

Full conjugation of Root Verb-e- going
Singular Dual incl. Dual excl. Plural excl. Plural incl.

1st gega - I'm going inega - We're going (you + I) osdega - We two are going (not you) otsega - We're all going (3+, not you) idega we're all going (3+, including you)

2nd hega - you're going 'sdega - you two are going itsega - you are all going

3rd ega - she/he/it's going anega They are going

Full conjugation of Root Verb-e- going
	Singular	Dual incl.	Dual excl.	Plural excl.	Plural incl.
1st	gega - I'm going	inega - We're going (you + I)	osdega - We two are going (not you)	otsega - We're all going (3+, not you)	idega we're all going (3+, including you)
2nd	hega - you're going	'sdega - you two are going	itsega - you are all going
3rd	ega - she/he/it's going	anega They are going

The translation uses the present progressive ("at this time I am going"). Cherokee differentiates between progressive ("I am going") and habitual ("I go") more than English does.

The forms gegoi, hegoi, egoi represent "I often/usually go", "you often/usually go", and "she/he/it often/usually goes", respectively.^[14]

Verbs can also have prepronominal prefixes, reflexive prefixes, and derivative suffixes. Given all possible combinations of affixes, each regular verb can have 21,262 inflected forms.

Cherokee does not make gender distinctions. For example, gawoniha can mean either "she is speaking" or "he is speaking."^[15]

Shape classifiers in verbs

Some Cherokee verbs require special classifiers which denote a physical property of the direct object. Only around 20 common verbs require one of these classifiers (such as the equivalents of "pick up", "put down", "remove", "wash", "hide", "eat", "drag", "have", "hold", "put in water", "put in fire", "hang up", "be placed", "pull along"). The classifiers can be grouped into five categories:

1. Live
2. Flexible (most common)
3. Long (narrow, not flexible)
4. Indefinite (solid, heavy relative to size)
5. Liquid (or container of)

Example:

Conjugation of "Hand him..."
Classifier Type	Cherokee	Translation
Live	hikasi	Hand him (something living)
Flexible	hinvsi	Hand him (something like clothes, rope)
Long, Indefinite	hidisi	Hand him (something like a broom, pencil)
Indefinite	hivsi	Hand him (something like food, book)
Liquid	hinevsi	Hand him (something like water)

There have been reports that the youngest speakers of Cherokee are using only the Indefinite forms, suggesting a decline in the system of shape classification.

Word order

Simple declarative sentences usually have a subject-object-verb word order.^[16] Negative sentences have a different word order. Adjectives come before nouns, as in English. Demonstratives, such as nasgi ("that") or hia ("this"), come at the beginning of noun phrases. Relative clauses follow noun phrases.^[17] Adverbs precede the verbs that they are modifying. For example, "she's speaking loudly" is asdaya gawoniha (literally, "loud she's-speaking").^[17]

A Cherokee sentence may not have a verb as when two noun phrases form a sentence. In such a case, word order is flexible. For example, na asgaya agidoda ("that man is my father"). A noun phrase might be followed by an adjective, such as in agidoga utana ("my father is big").^[18]

Writing system

Bilingual notice in English and Cherokee, published in the Cherokee Phoenix, New Echota, Georgia, 1828

Cherokee traffic sign in Tahlequah, Oklahoma

Main article: Cherokee syllabary

Cherokee is written in an 85-character syllabary invented by Sequoyah (also known as Guest or George Gist). Some symbols resemble Latin alphabet letters, but with completely different sound values; Sequoyah had seen English, Hebrew, and Greek writing but did not know how to read them.^[19]

Two other writing systems beside the syllabary are a simple Latin alphabet transliteration of the language or a linguistic system with diacritical marks.^[20]

Books in Cherokee

Awi Uniyvsdi Kanohelvdi ᎠᏫ ᎤᏂᏴᏍᏗ ᎧᏃᎮᎸᏗ: The Park Hill Tales. (2006) Sixkiller, Dennis, ed.
Baptism: The Mode
Cherokee Almanac (1860)
"Christmas in those Days"
Cherokee Driver's Manuel
Cherokee Elementary Arithmetic (1870)
"The Cherokee People Today"
Cherokee Psalms: A Collection of Hymns in the Cherokee Language (1991). Sharpe, J. Ed., ed. and Daniel Scott, trans. ISBN 978-0-935741-16-2
Cherokee Spelling Book (1924). J. D. Wofford
Cherokee Stories. (1966) Spade & Walker
Cherokee Vision of Elohi (1981 and 1997). Meredith, Howard, Virginia Sobral, and Wesley Proctor. ISBN 978-0-9660164-0-6
The Four Gospels and Selected Psalms in Cherokee: A Companion to the Syllabary New Testament (2004). Holmes, Ruth Bradley. ISBN 978-0-8061-3628-8.
Na Tsoi Yona Ꮎ ᏦᎢ ᏲᎾ: The Three Bears. (2007) Keeter, Ray D. and Wynema Smith. ISBN 0-9777339-0-4.
Na Usdi Gigage Agisi Tsitaga Ꮎ ᎤᏍᏗ ᎩᎦᎨ ᎠᎩᏏ: The Little Red Hen. (2007) Smith, Wynema and Ray D. Keeter. ISBN 978-0-9777339-1-0.

Word creation

Due to the polysynthetic nature of the Cherokee language, new and descriptive words in Cherokee are easily constructed to reflect or express modern concepts. Some good examples are ditiyohihi (Cherokee:ᏗᏘᏲᎯᎯ) which means "he argues repeatedly and on purpose with a purpose." This is the Cherokee word for "attorney." Another example is didaniyisgi (Cherokee:ᏗᏓᏂᏱᏍᎩ) which means "the final catcher" or "he catches them finally and conclusively." This is the Cherokee word for "policeman."^[21]

Many words, however, have been adopted from the English language – for example, gasoline, which in Cherokee is gasoline (Cherokee:ᎦᏐᎵᏁ). Many other words were adopted from the languages of tribes who settled in Oklahoma in the early 1900s. One interesting and humorous example is the name of Nowata, Oklahoma. The word "nowata" is a Delaware word for "welcome" (more precisely the Delaware word is "nuwita" which can mean "welcome" or "friend" in the Delaware language). The white settlers of the area used the name "nowata" for the township, and local Cherokees, being unaware the word had its origins in the Delaware language, called the town Amadikanigvnagvna (Cherokee:ᎠᎹᏗᎧᏂᎬᎾᎬᎾ) which means "the water is all gone gone from here" – i.e. "no water."^[22]

Other examples of adopted words are kawi (Cherokee:ᎧᏫ) for coffee and watsi (Cherokee:ᏩᏥ) for watch (which led to utana watsi (Cherokee:ᎤᏔᎾ ᏩᏥ) or "big watch" for clock).^[22]

Meaning expansion can be illustrated by the words for "warm" and "cold". They also mean "south" and "north" by an obvious extension. Around the time of the American Civil War, they were further extended to US party labels, Democratic and Republican, respectively.^[23]

Language drift

Drifted Otali Sequoyah Syllabary Mapping
Otali Syllable	Sequoyah Syllabary Index	Sequoyah Syllabary Chart	Sequoyah Syllable
nah	32	Ꮐ	nah
hna	31	Ꮏ	hna
qua	38	Ꮖ	qua
que	39	Ꮗ	que
qui	40	Ꮘ	qui
quo	41	Ꮙ	quo
quu	42	Ꮚ	quu
quv	43	Ꮛ	quv
dla	60	Ꮬ	dla
tla	61	Ꮭ	tla
tle	62	Ꮮ	tle
tli	63	Ꮯ	tli
tlo	64	Ꮰ	tlo
tlu	65	Ꮱ	tlu
tlv	66	Ꮲ	tlv
tsa	67	Ꮳ	tsa
tse	68	Ꮴ	tse
tsi	69	Ꮵ	tsi
tso	70	Ꮶ	tso
tsu	71	Ꮷ	tsu
tsv	72	Ꮸ	tsv
hah	79	Ꮿ	ya
gwu	11	Ꭻ	gu
gwi	40	Ꮘ	qui
hla	61	Ꮭ	tla
hwa	73	Ꮹ	wa
gwa	38	Ꮖ	qua
hlv	66	Ꮲ	tlv
guh	11	Ꭻ	gu
gwe	39	Ꮗ	que
wah	73	Ꮹ	wa
hnv	37	Ꮕ	nv
teh	54	Ꮦ	te
qwa	06	Ꭶ	ga
yah	79	Ꮿ	ya
na	30	Ꮎ	na
ne	33	Ꮑ	ne
ni	34	Ꮒ	ni
no	35	Ꮓ	no
nu	36	Ꮔ	nu
nv	37	Ꮕ	nv
ga	06	Ꭶ	ga
ka	07	Ꭷ	ka
ge	08	Ꭸ	ge
gi	09	Ꭹ	gi
go	10	Ꭺ	go
gu	11	Ꭻ	gu
gv	12	Ꭼ	gv
ha	13	Ꭽ	ha
he	14	Ꭾ	he
hi	15	Ꭿ	hi
ho	16	Ꮀ	ho
hu	17	Ꮁ	hu
hv	18	Ꮂ	hv
ma	25	Ꮉ	ma
me	26	Ꮊ	me
mi	27	Ꮋ	mi
mo	28	Ꮌ	mo
mu	29	Ꮍ	mu
da	51	Ꮣ	da
ta	52	Ꮤ	ta
de	53	Ꮥ	de
te	54	Ꮦ	te
di	55	Ꮧ	di
ti	56	Ꮨ	ti
do	57	Ꮩ	do
du	58	Ꮪ	du
dv	59	Ꮫ	dv
la	19	Ꮃ	la
le	20	Ꮄ	le
li	21	Ꮅ	li
lo	22	Ꮆ	lo
lu	23	Ꮇ	lu
lv	24	Ꮈ	lv
sa	44	Ꮜ	sa
se	46	Ꮞ	se
si	47	Ꮟ	si
so	48	Ꮠ	so
su	49	Ꮡ	su
sv	50	Ꮢ	sv
wa	73	Ꮹ	wa
we	74	Ꮺ	we
wi	75	Ꮻ	wi
wo	76	Ꮼ	wo
wu	77	Ꮽ	wu
wv	78	Ꮾ	wv
ya	79	Ꮿ	ya
ye	80	Ᏸ	ye
yi	81	Ᏹ	yi
yo	82	Ᏺ	yo
yu	83	Ᏻ	yu
yv	84	Ᏼ	yv
to	57	Ꮩ	do
tu	58	Ꮪ	du
ko	10	Ꭺ	go
tv	59	Ꮫ	dv
qa	73	Ꮹ	wa
ke	07	Ꭷ	ka
kv	12	Ꭼ	gv
ah	00	Ꭰ	a
qo	10	Ꭺ	go
oh	03	Ꭳ	o
ju	71	Ꮷ	tsu
ji	69	Ꮵ	tsi
ja	67	Ꮳ	tsa
je	68	Ꮴ	tse
jo	70	Ꮶ	tso
jv	72	Ꮸ	tsv
a	00	Ꭰ	a
e	01	Ꭱ	e
i	02	Ꭲ	i
o	03	Ꭳ	o
u	04	Ꭴ	u
v	05	Ꭵ	v
s	45	Ꮝ	s
n	30	Ꮎ	na
l	02	Ꭲ	i
t	52	Ꮤ	ta
d	55	Ꮧ	di
y	80	Ᏸ	ye
k	06	Ꭶ	ga
g	06	Ꭶ	ga

There are two main dialects of Cherokee spoken by modern speakers. The Giduwa dialect (Eastern Band) and the Otali Dialect (also called the Overhill dialect) spoken in Oklahoma. The Otali dialect has drifted significantly from Sequoyah's syllabary in the past 150 years, and many contracted and borrowed words have been adopted into the language. These noun and verb roots in Cherokee, however, can still be mapped to Sequoyah's syllabary. In modern times, there are more than 85 syllables in use by modern Cherokee speakers. Modern Cherokee speakers who speak Otali employ 122 distinct syllables in Oklahoma.^{[citation needed]}

Computer and smartphone usage

For years, many people wrote transliterated Cherokee on the internet or used poorly compatible fonts to type out the syllabary. However, since the fairly recent addition of the Cherokee syllables to Unicode, the Cherokee language is experiencing a renaissance in its use on the Internet. For example, the entire New Testament^[24] is online in Cherokee Syllabary, and there is a Cherokee language Wikipedia featuring over 200 articles.^[25] Since 2003, all Apple computers come with a Cherokee font installed.^[26]

Cherokee Nation members Joseph L. Erb, Roy Boney, Jr., and Thomas Jeff Edwards worked with Apple to bring official Cherokee language support to the iPhone and iPod Touch in iOS 4.1^[26]^[27] (released 8-Sept-2010) and for the iPad with iOS 4.2.1 (released 22-Nov-2010).

Most Linux distributions support Cherokee input and display in any font containing the characters in Unicode environments.

On March 25, 2011, Google announced the option to perform searches in Cherokee.^[28]