Cherokee

Cherokee is spoken by upwards of 10,000 peop1e, the vast majority living near the town of Tahlequah in northeastern Oklahoma. About 1,000 speakers live in western North Carolina, on a reservation near the town of Cherokee. The Cherokee language is of the Iroquoian family, most closely related to Seneca, Mohawk, and Oneida.

Cherokee writing, pictured below, is the creation of Sequoyah, one of the great names in the history of the American Indian. Convinced that the key to the white man's power lay in his possession of a written language, he set about bringing this secret to his own people. In 1821, after twelve years of work, he produced a syllabary of eighty-six characters, representing every sound in the Cherokee language. The system was quickly mastered by thousands of Cherokees and within three years a newspaper began to be published, and a constitution for the Cherokee Nation was drawn up in the Cherokee language.

Sequoyah borrowed many of his characters from English, but since he actually neither spoke nor read English, they represent completely different sounds in the two languages. The letter D, for example, is pronounced a, while h is pronounced ni, W is pronounced la, and Z is pronounced no. But the Sequoyah syllabary has remained in use to the present day, with no modifications considered necessary in 150 years. That an unlettered hunter and craftsman could complete a task now undertaken only by highly trained linguists must surely rank as one of the most impressive intellectual feats achieved by a single man.