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Cherokee (ᏣᎳᎩ, Tsalagi) 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. Cherokee is polysynthetic.

The Cherokee 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 where the contemporary Ani-kutani (ᎠᏂᎫᏔᏂ) dialect spoken in North Carolina and the Oklahoma dialects contain l. As such, the word "Cherokee" when spoken in the language is expressed as Tsa-la-gi (pronounced Jah-la-gee, Cha-la-gee, or Cha-la-g) by native speakers. The language also lacks p and b.

Phonology

Cherokee only has one labial consonant, m–which is relatively new to the language–unless one counts the Cherokee w a labial instead of a velar. 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).

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.

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 has a robust tonal system in which tones may be combined in various ways, following subtle and complex tonal rules that vary from community to community. While the tonal system is undergoing a gradual simplification in many areas (no doubt as part of Cherokee's often falling victim to second-language status), the tonal system remains extremely important in meaning and is still held strongly by many, especially older speakers. It should be noted that the syllabary does not normally display tone, and that 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.

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. Consider the following verb:

Verb form ge:ga

g-	e:	-g	-a
PRONOMINAL PREFIX	VERB ROOT "to go"	ASPECT SUFFIX	MODAL SUFFIX

For example, the verb form ge:ga, "I am going," has each of these elements. 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 be. Please note that there is no separate plural form in the 3rd person. The dual form serves both the dual and plural functions.

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 - (s)he/it's going	-	anega They (2+) are going	-	-

Notice that translation is the present progressive (at this time I am going). The Cherokee language differentiates clearer between the progressive and the habitual (I go), more so than the Western Indo-European languages.

The forms gegoi, hegoi, egoi represent "I often/usually go", "you often/usually go", and "he often/usually goes" (respectively).

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.

Writing system

Cherokee is written in an 85-character syllabary invented by Sequoyah (also known as George Gist). Some symbols do resemble Latin alphabet letters, but with completely different sound values; Sequoyah had seen English writing, but didn't know how to read it.

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 di-ti-yo-hi-hi (Cherokee:ᏗᏘᏲᎯᎯ) which means "he argues repeatedly and on purpose with a purpose". This is the Cherokee word for attorney. Another example is di-da-ni-yi-s-gi (Cherokee:ᏗᏓᏂᏱᏍᎩ) which means the final catcher or "he catches them finally and conclusively". This is the Cherokee word for policeman.

Many words, however, have been adopted from the English language – for example, gasoline, which in Cherokee is ga-so-li-ne (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 "nu-wi-ta" 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 a-ma-di-ka-ni-gv-na-gv-na (Cherokee:ᎠᎹᏗᎧᏂᎬᎾᎬᎾ) which means "the water is all gone gone from here" -- i.e. "no water".

Other examples of adopted words are ka-wi (Cherokee:ᎧᏫ) for coffee and wa-tsi (Cherokee:ᏩᏥ) for watch (which led to u-ta-na wa-tsi (Cherokee:ᎤᏔᎾ ᏩᏥ) or "big watch" for clock).

Some Cherokee writers use the Latin alphabet, however the syllabary is preferred.

Language drift

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.

Internet usage

For years, many people wrote transliterated Cherokee on the Internet or used poorly intercompatible 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.^{[citation needed]}

Cherokee language in popular culture

The theme song "I Will Find You" from the 1992 film The Last of the Mohicans by the band Clannad features Máire Brennan singing in Cherokee as well as Mohican.

See also

• Cherokee (people)
• Iroquoian languages
• Native American Languages
• Syllabary

References

• Cook, William Hinton (1979). A Grammar of North Carolina Cherokee. Ph.D. diss., Yale University. OCLC 7562394.
• King, Duane H. (1975). A Grammar and Dictionary of the Cherokee Language. Ph.D. diss., University of Georgia. OCLC 6203735.
• Lounsbury, Floyd G. (1978), "Iroquoian Languages", Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 15: Northeast, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, pp. 334–343, OCLC 12682465 {{citation}}: Unknown parameter |editors= ignored (|editor= suggested) (help).
• Munro, Pamela (ed.) (1996). Cherokee Papers from UCLA. UCLA Occasional Papers in Linguistics, no. 16. OCLC 36854333. {{cite book}}: |author= has generic name (help)
• Pulte, William, and Durbin Feeling. 2001. Cherokee. In: Garry, Jane, and Carl Rubino (eds.) Facts About the World's Languages: An Encyclopedia of the World's Major Languages: Past and Present. New York: H. W. Wilson. (Viewed at the Rosetta Project)
• Scancarelli, Janine (1987). Grammatical Relations and Verb Agreement in Cherokee. Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles. OCLC 40812890.
• Scancarelli, Janine. "Cherokee Writing." The World's Writing Systems. 1998: Section 53. (Viewed at the Rosetta Project)
• Scancarelli, Janine (2005), "Cherokee", in Janine Scancarelli and Heather K. Hardy (eds.) (ed.), Native Languages of the Southeastern United States, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press in cooperation with the American Indian Studies Research Institute, Indiana University, Bloomington, pp. 351–384, OCLC 56834622 {{citation}}: |editor= has generic name (help)
• Holmes, Ruth Bradley, and Betty Sharp Smith (1977). Beginning Cherokee: Talisgo Galiquogi Dideliquasdodi Tsalagi Digohweli. University of Oklahoma Press. OCLC 3791761.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• K International (2008). "http://www.k-international.com/cherokee_language". {{cite web}}: External link in |title= (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)

Notes

Further reading

External links

• Cherokee (Tsalagi) Lexicon
• Cherokee.org Dikanesdi (Lexicon)
• Echota Tsalagi Language Project
• Cherokee New Testament Online Online translation of the New Testament. Currently the largest Cherokee document on the internet.
• Exploration of the Red River of Louisiana, in the year 1852 / by Randolph B. Marcy ; assisted by George B. McClellan. hosted by the Portal to Texas History. See Appendix H, which compares the English, Comanche, and Wichita languages.
• Unicode Chart
• Offical Cherokee Font (Not Unicode-compatible)