Cherokee (Tsalagi)

Introduction

Cherokee Nation

Cherokee Women

Cherokee belongs to the Iroquoian language family. Linguists believe that the Cherokee people migrated to the southeast from the Great Lakes region about three thousand years ago. Despite the three-thousand-year geographic separation, the Cherokee language today still shows similarities to the languages spoken around the Great Lakes, such as Mohawk, Onondega, Seneca, Tuscorora, and Wyandot-Huron.

The name of the language occurs in several forms. The form Cherokee came from the Eastern dialect, while the form Tsalagi came from the Western dialect. Today, all Cherokee refer to themselves as tsa-la-gi.

In 1540 the Cherokee lay claim to a 40,000 square-mile territory that today partly includes the states of Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee. In the late 18th century, some Cherokee were paid a fee to voluntarily migrate west, but most of them remained on their ancestral lands. In 1838, under pressure from white settlers, Andrew Jackson ordered a forcible removal of some 20,000 Cherokee to Oklahoma, the home of The Cherokee Nation today. Several thousand died along the way, and the forced march became known as the Trail of Tears. The journey is called in Cherokee nu-na-hi du-na tlo-hi-lu-i "trail where they cried." Several hundred Cherokee evaded removal by hiding in the mountains of North Carolina. In 1842, they received permission to remain on lands set apart for their use in western North Carolina that now constitute the Qualla Reservation.

There are several dialects of Cherokee:

The Overhill dialect is spoken in northeastern Oklahoma.
The Middle dialect is spoken on the Qualla Boundary in North Carolina.
The Lower dialect is now extinct.

Status
Cherokee speakers constitute the seventh largest group of speakers of native languages north of Mexico. Despite the size of the population, Cherokee is an endangered language. The good news is that increasing numbers of Cherokee descendants are renewing their ties with their traditions, history and language. With this renewal comes the understanding that their Cherokee heritage must be preserved and passed on to the next generation. In some communities in eastern Oklahoma and western North Carolina, Cherokee is now used by speakers of all ages. In Qualla and the Cherokee Nation, Cherokee linguists are working to ensure that the Cherokee language survives.

Structure

Sound System

Cherokee has a relatively small inventory of phonemes.

Vowels
Cherokee has six vowels which can be either short or long. Vowel length distinguishes the meaning of words. It is usually indicated by a colon after the vowel, e.g., a long /a/ is written as a:. The language has one somewhat unusual vowel: a nasalized schwa (like the vowel in but that is nasalized).

Consonants
There are seventeen consonants in Cherokee, although this number is disputed. Like other Iroquoian languages, Cherokee lacks the labial sounds /p/, /b/, /f/, /v/. The sound /m/ is the only labial sound. It has limited distribution, occurring in only a few native words which suggests that it was a latecomer into the language. However, all of these sounds can be found in loanwords from English.

Pitch accent
Cherokee syllables may be marked by low, mid, or high pitch. They are usually indicated by the numberals 2, 3, and 4. There is also a falling pitch, and two rising pitches. It should be noted that the nature of Cherokee pitch accent is still very much unresolved.

Click here to listen to "Amazing Grace" sung in Cherokee.

Grammar

Grammar
Cherokee is a polysynthetic language, i.e., it adds prefixes and suffixes to stems in order to express grammatical relationships. This may result in rather long words.

Noun phrase
Cherokee nouns belong to one of two classes: animate and inanimate that use different plural markers. Nouns are derived from verbs by using derivational suffixes. For instance, the agentive suffix -i is used to derive the noun gawonsisgi "speaker" (literally," one who often speaks") from the verb gawonisgo "he speaks all the time."

Verb phrase
Cherokee verbs are very complex. They consist normally of a pronominal prefix, a verb root, an aspect suffix, and a modal suffix. Here is an example from Wikipedia.

ke:ka
k-	-e:-	-k-	-a
prefix first person singular	root "to go"	suffix aspect marker	suffix present tense marker
"I am going."

Verbs can also have prepronominal prefixes, reflexive prefixes, and derivational (word forming) suffixes. This gives rise to many possible combinations, so that Cherokee verbs potentially have thousands of different inflected forms. It can also result in extremely long words that in less synthetic languages such as English constitute an entire sentence.

Sentence structure
The usual word order in Cherokee is Subject-Object-Verb. Adjectives precede nouns.

Vocabulary

Cherokee tends to rely on its own linguistic resources rather than on loanwords. For instance, instead of borrowing the word for "airplane" from English, the Cherokee created the word tsi-yu ga-no-hi-li-to-hi (literally "the thing that one flies in").

Here are some common words and phrases in Cherokee. This will give you an idea how different this language is from English.

you	ni-hi
I	yv
yes	v (pronounced uh)
no	tla
boy	a `tsu tsa
boys	ah-choo-jah-a-ni-tsu-tsa
girl	a-ge -`hu-tsa
girls	ah-gay-hu-ge-jah aneigehutsa
brother	da-nv-tli
brothers	a-na-da-nv-tli
Hello!	O-si-yo
How are you?	(t)do-`hi-tsu
Good morning!	o-s-da sunalei
Thank you.	wa-do
You are welcome.	gv-li-e-li-ga
Good-bye.	do-na-da-`go-v-i (to 1 person) do-`da-ga-g`hv-i (to a group)
What's your name?	ga-do-de-tsa do

Click here to see a small Cherokee glossary.

Writing

Cherokee was one of the first American Indian languages to have a system of writing devised especially for it. In 1821, the Cherokee tribal council approved a Cherokee syllabary created by Sequoyah, a Cherokee speaker who knew only a few words of English. Using printed alphabets of other languages given to him by missionaries, he created a Cherokee syllabary with eighty-six letters adapting them from English, Greek, and Hebrew alphabets. One letter was thrown out in the process of creating a version for the printing press, which left the eighty-five-letter syllabary in use today in which each symbol represents a syllable usually consisting of a consonant and a vowel.

The syllabary is no longer in public use, although there are efforts to revive its use for a greater variety of purposes.

Cherokee Syllabary

Click here to listen to the pronunciation of the sounds associated with these symbols.

Sequoyah
Biographers think that Sequoyah was the son of a British trader named Nathaniel Gist and a Cherokee mother. He never learned English but he was convinced that white people had the power because they had a written language. In 1809, he began developing a system of writing for his tribesmen hoping that it would increase their knowledge and help them maintain their independence from white settlers.

Resources

Cherokee Language and Culture Study Resources
UCLA Language Materials Listing for the Less Commonly Taught Languages
UCLA Language Materials Project - Cherokee Profile
UCLA Language Materials Project Cherokee Links
University of Minnesota Less Commonly Taught Languages Database
Yamada Language Center Cherokee Guide
Cherokee Language Resources
University of Georgia Cherokee Indian links
RGY Raven's Tsalagi Resources
Encyclopedia of North American Indian Languages - Cherokee
Museum of the Cherokee Indian
Cherokee Language and Culture Preservation
On-line English-Cherokee Dictionary
Omniglot Guide to Written Language - Cherokee
Wikipedia - Cherokee Language