Cherokee Language

Cherokee Language, the second most widely used Native American language, spoken by an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 Cherokee in northeastern Oklahoma and another 2,000 near the Qualla Reservation in North Carolina. It is still spoken in many Cherokee homes and churches.

Cherokee comprises the southern branch of the Iroquoian language family. The northern branch includes Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, and Seneca-Cayuga. The linguistic split occurred about 3000 years ago, when the Cherokee migrated south from the Great Lakes region in east central North America to what is now Tennessee, Georgia, and North Carolina.

While the Maya, Aztec, Delaware, and Chippewa all developed a hieroglyphic writing system, Cherokee is the only Native American language to have produced a syllabary, a type of alphabet. Sequoyah, a Cherokee with no knowledge of English, developed the entire syllabary on his own during the early 1800s. Sequoyah’s system spread rapidly, and by the 1840s two newspapers were published in Cherokee.

Cherokee is a meticulous, economical language, with few individual words but a precise system for elaborating each word base. Verbs are short phrases that tell not only what happened, but when and how. Nouns are descriptive; for example, a horse is so qui li, or “he carries heavy things”.

The Cherokee language split into two main dialects after the Trail of Tears in 1838 and 1839, when most Cherokee were forced from their land in the southeast to territory in Oklahoma and Texas. A few Cherokee remained hidden in the hills of North Carolina, and today their descendants comprise the eastern branch of the tribe.

Because of a renewed interest in their cultural heritage, more and more Cherokee are learning the language, making it one of the few Native American languages that is spreading.