| Cherokee | |
| Also Known As: | Southern Iroquoian |
| Nativename: | Cherokee: ᏣᎳᎩ ᎦᏬᏂᎯᏍᏗ|italic=no Cherokee: Tsalagi Gawonihisdi |
| Pronunciation: | pronounced as /chr/ |
| States: | North America |
| Region: | Eastern Oklahoma
|
| Ethnicity: | Cherokee |
| Speakers: | 1520 to ~2100 |
| Date: | 2018-2019 |
| Familycolor: | American |
| Fam1: | Iroquoian |
| Script: | Cherokee syllabary, Latin script |
| Nation: | Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in North Carolina, Cherokee Nation[4] of Oklahoma |
| Agency: | United Keetoowah Band Department of Language, History, & Culture Council of the Cherokee Nation |
| Map: | Cherokee lang.png |
| Map2: | Cherokee Speaking Areas Within The USA.png |
| Mapcaption2: | Current geographic distribution of the Cherokee language |
| Iso2: | chr |
| Iso3: | chr |
| Glotto: | cher1273 |
| Glottorefname: | Cherokee |
| Lingua: | 63-AB |
| Notice: | IPA |
right|350px|thumb|Number of speakersright|thumb|Cherokee is classified as Critically Endangered by UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger
Cherokee or Tsalagi (Cherokee: ᏣᎳᎩ ᎦᏬᏂᎯᏍᏗ|Tsalagi Gawonihisdi|links=no, pronounced as /chr/) is an endangered-to-moribund Iroquoian language[5] and the native language of the Cherokee people.[6] [7] [8] Ethnologue states that there were 1,520 Cherokee speakers out of 376,000 Cherokees in 2018, while a tally by the three Cherokee tribes in 2019 recorded about 2,100 speakers.[9] The number of speakers is in decline. The Tahlequah Daily Press reported in 2019 that most speakers are elderly, about eight fluent speakers die each month, and that only 5 people under the age of 50 are fluent.[10] The dialect of Cherokee in Oklahoma is "definitely endangered", and the one in North Carolina is "severely endangered" according to UNESCO. The Lower dialect, formerly spoken on the South Carolina–Georgia border, has been extinct since about 1900. The dire situation regarding the future of the two remaining dialects prompted the Tri-Council of Cherokee tribes to declare a state of emergency in June 2019, with a call to enhance revitalization efforts.
Around 200 speakers of the Eastern (also referred to as the Middle or Kituwah) dialect remain in North Carolina, and language preservation efforts include the New Kituwah Academy, a bilingual immersion school.[11] The largest remaining group of Cherokee speakers is centered around Tahlequah, Oklahoma, where the Western (Overhill or Otali) dialect predominates. The Cherokee Immersion School (Cherokee: Tsalagi Tsunadeloquasdi) in Tahlequah serves children in federally recognized tribes from pre-school up to grade 6.[12]
Cherokee, a polysynthetic language,[13] is also the only member of the Southern Iroquoian family, and it uses a unique syllabary writing system.[14] As a polysynthetic language, Cherokee differs dramatically from Indo-European languages such as English, French, Spanish, or Portuguese, and as such can be difficult for adult learners to acquire. A single Cherokee word can convey ideas that would require multiple English words to express, from the context of the assertion and connotations about the speaker to the idea's action and its object. The morphological complexity of the Cherokee language is best exhibited in verbs, which comprise approximately 75% of the language, as opposed to only 25% of the English language. Verbs must contain at minimum a pronominal prefix, a verb root, an aspect suffix, and a modal suffix.
Extensive documentation of the language exists, as it is the indigenous language of North America in which the most literature has been published.[15] Such publications include a Cherokee dictionary and grammar, as well as several editions of the New Testament and Psalms of the Bible[16] and the Cherokee Phoenix (Cherokee: ᏣᎳᎩ ᏧᎴᎯᏌᏅᎯ, Cherokee: Tsalagi Tsulehisanvhi), the first newspaper published by Native Americans in the United States and the first published in a Native American language.[17] [18]
Cherokee is an Iroquoian language, and the only Southern Iroquoian language spoken today. Linguists believe that the Cherokee people migrated to the southeast from the Great Lakes region about three thousand years ago, bringing with them their language. Despite the three-thousand-year geographic separation, the Cherokee language today still shows some similarities to the languages spoken around the Great Lakes, such as Mohawk, Onondaga, Seneca, and Tuscarora.
Some researchers (such as Thomas Whyte) have suggested the homeland of the proto-Iroquoian language resides in Appalachia. Whyte contends, based on linguistic and molecular studies, that proto-Iroquoian speakers participated in cultural and economic exchanges along the north–south axis of the Appalachian Mountains. The divergence of Southern Iroquoian (which Cherokee is the only known branch of) from the Northern Iroquoian languages occurred approximately 4,000–3,000 years ago as Late Archaic proto-Iroquoian speaking peoples became more sedentary with the advent of horticulture, advancement of lithic technologies and the emergence of social complexity in the Eastern Woodlands. In the subsequent millennia, the Northern Iroquoian and Southern Iroquoian would be separated by various Algonquin and Siouan speaking peoples as linguistic, religious, social and technological practices from the Algonquin to the north and east and the Siouans to the west from the Ohio Valley would come to be practiced by peoples in the Chesapeake region, as well as parts of the Carolinas.
See main article: History of the Cherokee language.
See also: Cherokee history.
See also: Cherokee syllabary and Sequoyah.
Before the development of the Cherokee syllabary in the 1820s, Cherokee was an oral language only. The Cherokee syllabary is a set of written symbols invented by Sequoyah in the late 1810s and early 1820s to write the Cherokee language. His creation of the syllabary is particularly noteworthy in that he could not previously read any script. Sequoyah had some contact with English literacy and the Roman alphabet through his proximity to Fort Loudoun, where he engaged in trade with Europeans. He was exposed to English literacy through his white father. His limited understanding of the Latin alphabet, including the ability to recognize the letters of his name, may have aided him in the creation of the Cherokee syllabary.[19] When developing the written language, Sequoyah first experimented with logograms, but his system later developed into a syllabary. In his system, each symbol represents a syllable rather than a single phoneme; the 85 (originally 86) characters in the Cherokee syllabary provide a suitable method to write Cherokee. Some typeface syllables do resemble the Latin, Greek, and even the Cyrillic scripts' letters, but the sounds are completely different (for example, the sound pronounced as //a// is written with a letter that resembles Latin D).
Around 1809, Sequoyah began work to create a system of writing for the Cherokee language.[20] At first he sought to create a character for each word in the language. He spent a year on this effort, leaving his fields unplanted, so that his friends and neighbors thought he had lost his mind.[21] [22] His wife is said to have burned his initial work, believing it to be witchcraft. He finally realized that this approach was impractical because it would require too many pictures to be remembered. He then tried making a symbol for every idea, but this also caused too many problems to be practical.[23]
Sequoyah did not succeed until he gave up trying to represent entire words and developed a written symbol for each syllable in the language. After approximately a month, he had a system of 86 characters. "In their present form, [typeface syllabary not the original handwritten Syllabary] many of the syllabary characters resemble Roman, Cyrillic, or Greek letters, or Arabic numerals," says Janine Scancarelli, a scholar of Cherokee writing, "but there is no apparent relationship between their sounds in other languages and in Cherokee."
Unable to find adults willing to learn the syllabary, he taught it to his daughter, Ayokeh (also spelled Ayoka). Langguth says she was only six years old at the time.[24] He traveled to the Indian Reserves in the Arkansas Territory where some Cherokees had settled. When he tried to convince the local leaders of the syllabary's usefulness, they doubted him, believing that the symbols were merely ad hoc reminders. Sequoyah asked each to say a word, which he wrote down, and then called his daughter in to read the words back. This demonstration convinced the leaders to let him teach the syllabary to a few more people. This took several months, during which it was rumored that he might be using the students for sorcery. After completing the lessons, Sequoyah wrote a dictated letter to each student, and read a dictated response. This test convinced the western Cherokees that he had created a practical writing system.
When Sequoyah returned east, he brought a sealed envelope containing a written speech from one of the Arkansas Cherokee leaders. By reading this speech, he convinced the eastern Cherokees also to learn the system, after which it spread rapidly. In 1825 the Cherokee Nation officially adopted the writing system. From 1828 to 1834, American missionaries assisted the Cherokees in using Sequoyah's original syllabary to develop typeface syllabary characters and print the Cherokee Phoenix, the first newspaper of the Cherokee Nation, with text in both Cherokee and English.[25]
In 1826, the Cherokee National Council commissioned George Lowrey and David Brown to translate and print eight copies of the laws of the Cherokee Nation in the new Cherokee language typeface using Sequoyah's system, but not his original self-created handwritten syllable glyphs.
Once Albert Gallatin saw a copy of Sequoyah's syllabary, he found the syllabary superior to the English alphabet. Even though a Cherokee student must learn 86 syllables instead of 26 letters, they can read immediately. Students could accomplish in a few weeks what students of English writing could learn in two years.
In 1824, the General Council of the Eastern Cherokees awarded Sequoyah a large silver medal in honor of the syllabary. According to Davis, one side of the medal bore his image surrounded by the inscription in English, "Presented to George Gist by the General Council of the Cherokee for his ingenuity in the invention of the Cherokee Alphabet." The reverse side showed two long-stemmed pipes and the same inscription written in Cherokee. Supposedly, Sequoyah wore the medal throughout the rest of his life, and it was buried with him.
By 1825, the Bible and numerous religious hymns and pamphlets, educational materials, legal documents, and books were translated into the Cherokee language. Thousands of Cherokees became literate and the literacy rate for Cherokees in the original syllabary, as well as the typefaced syllabary, was higher in the Cherokee Nation than that of literacy of whites in the English alphabet in the United States.
Though use of the Cherokee syllabary declined after many of the Cherokees were forcibly removed to Indian Territory, present-day Oklahoma, it has survived in private correspondence, renderings of the Bible, and descriptions of Indian medicine[26] and now can be found in books and on the internet among other places.
In February 2022, Motorola Mobility introduced a Cherokee language interface for its latest smartphone. Eastern Band Principal Chief Richard Sneed, who along with other Cherokee leaders worked with Motorola on the development, considered this an effort to preserve the language. Features included not only symbols but also the culture.[27]
The language remains concentrated in some Oklahoma communities[28] and communities like Big Cove and Snowbird in North Carolina.[29]
At the time of European contact, there were three major dialects of Cherokee: Lower, Middle, and Overhill. The Lower dialect, formerly spoken on the South Carolina-Georgia border, has been extinct since about 1900. Of the remaining two dialects, the Middle dialect (Kituwah) is spoken by the Eastern Band on the Qualla Boundary, and retains ~200 speakers. The Overhill, or Western, dialect is spoken in eastern Oklahoma and by the Snowbird Community in North Carolina by ~1,300 people. The Western dialect is most widely used and is considered the main dialect of the language.[30] Both dialects have had English influence, with the Overhill, or Western dialect showing some Spanish influence as well.
The now extinct 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 dialect spoken in North Carolina and the Overhill dialect contain l.
| Drifted Otali Sequoyah syllabary mapping | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Otali syllable | Sequoyah syllabary index | Sequoyah syllabary chart | Sequoyah syllable | |
| a | 00 | Ꭰ | a | |
| e | 01 | Ꭱ | e | |
| i | 02 | Ꭲ | i | |
| o | 03 | Ꭳ | o | |
| u | 04 | Ꭴ | u | |
| v | 05 | Ꭵ | v | |
| qwa | 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 | |
| la | 19 | Ꮃ | la | |
| le | 20 | Ꮄ | le | |
| li | 21 | Ꮅ | li | |
| lo | 22 | Ꮆ | lo | |
| lu | 23 | Ꮇ | lu | |
| lv | 24 | Ꮈ | lv | |
| ma | 25 | Ꮉ | ma | |
| me | 26 | Ꮊ | me | |
| mi | 27 | Ꮋ | mi | |
| mo | 28 | Ꮌ | mo | |
| mu | 29 | Ꮍ | mu | |
| na | 30 | Ꮎ | na | |
| hna | 31 | Ꮏ | hna | |
| nah | 32 | Ꮐ | nah | |
| ne | 33 | Ꮑ | ne | |
| ni | 34 | Ꮒ | ni | |
| no | 35 | Ꮓ | no | |
| nu | 36 | Ꮔ | nu | |
| nv | 37 | Ꮕ | nv | |
| qua | 38 | Ꮖ | qua | |
| que | 39 | Ꮗ | que | |
| qui | 40 | Ꮘ | qui | |
| quo | 41 | Ꮙ | quo | |
| quu | 42 | Ꮚ | quu | |
| quv | 43 | Ꮛ | quv | |
| sa | 44 | Ꮜ | sa | |
| s | 45 | Ꮝ | s | |
| se | 46 | Ꮞ | se | |
| si | 47 | Ꮟ | si | |
| so | 48 | Ꮠ | so | |
| su | 49 | Ꮡ | su | |
| sv | 50 | Ꮢ | sv | |
| 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 | |
| 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 | |
| ja | 67 | Ꮳ | tsa | |
| je | 68 | Ꮴ | tse | |
| ji | 69 | Ꮵ | tsi | |
| jo | 70 | Ꮶ | tso | |
| ju | 71 | Ꮷ | tsu | |
| jv | 72 | Ꮸ | tsv | |
| hwa | 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 | |
There are two main dialects of Cherokee spoken by modern speakers. The Giduwa (or Kituwah) 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. There are more than 85 syllables in use by modern Cherokee speakers.
In 2019, the Tri-Council of Cherokee tribes declared a state of emergency for the language due to the threat of it going extinct, calling for the enhancement of revitalization programs. The language retains about 1,500 to 2,100 Cherokee speakers, but an average of eight fluent speakers die each month, and only a handful of people under 40 years of age are fluent as of 2019. In 1986, the literacy rate for first language speakers was 15–20% who could read and 5% who could write, according to the 1986 Cherokee Heritage Center. A 2005 survey determined that the Eastern Band had 460 fluent speakers. Ten years later, the number was believed to be 200.[31]
Cherokee is "definitely endangered" in Oklahoma and "severely endangered" in North Carolina according to UNESCO.[32] Cherokee has been the co-official language of the Cherokee Nation alongside English since a 1991 legislation officially proclaimed this under the Act Relating to the Tribal Policy for the Promotion and Preservation of Cherokee Language, History, and Culture.[33] Cherokee is also recognized as the official language of the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians. As Cherokee is official, the entire constitution of the United Keetoowah Band is available in both English and Cherokee. As an official language, any tribal member may communicate with the tribal government in Cherokee or English, English translation services are provided for Cherokee speakers, and both Cherokee and English are used when the tribe provides services, resources, and information to tribal members or when communicating with the tribal council. The 1991 legislation allows the political branch of the nation to maintain Cherokee as a living language. Because they are within the Cherokee Nation tribal jurisdiction area, hospitals and health centers such as the Three Rivers Health Center in Muscogee, Oklahoma provide Cherokee language translation services.[34]
In 2008 the Cherokee Nation initiated a ten-year language preservation plan that involved growing new fluent speakers of the Cherokee language from childhood on up through school immersion programs, as well as a collaborative community effort to continue to use the language at home.[35] This plan was part of an ambitious goal that in 50 years, 80 percent or more of the Cherokee people will be fluent in the language. The Cherokee Preservation Foundation has invested $4.5 million into opening schools, training teachers, and developing curricula for language education, as well as initiating community gatherings where the language can be actively used. They have accomplished: "Curriculum development, teaching materials and teacher training for a total immersion program for children, beginning when they are preschoolers, that enables them to learn Cherokee as their first language. The participating children and their parents learn to speak and read together. The Tribe operates the Kituwah Academy".[36] Formed in 2006, the Kituwah Preservation & Education Program (KPEP) on the Qualla Boundary focuses on language immersion programs for children from birth to fifth grade, developing cultural resources for the general public and community language programs to foster the Cherokee language among adults.[37]
There is also a Cherokee language immersion school in Tahlequah, Oklahoma that educates students from pre-school through eighth grade.[38] A second campus was added in November 2021, when the school purchased Greasy School in Greasy, Oklahoma, located in southern Adair County ten miles south of Stilwell.[39] Situated in the largest area of Cherokee speakers in the world, the opportunity for that campus is for students to spend the day in an immersion school and then return to a Cherokee-speaking home.
Several universities offer Cherokee as a second language, including the University of Oklahoma, Northeastern State University, and Western Carolina University. Western Carolina University (WCU) has partnered with the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI) to promote and restore the language through the school's Cherokee Studies program, which offers classes in and about the language and culture of the Cherokee Indians.[40] WCU and the EBCI have initiated a ten-year language revitalization plan consisting of: (1) a continuation of the improvement and expansion of the EBCI Atse Kituwah Cherokee Language Immersion School, (2) continued development of Cherokee language learning resources, and (3) building of Western Carolina University programs to offer a more comprehensive language training curriculum.
In November 2022, the tribe opened a $20 million language center in a 52,000-square-foot building near its headquarters in Tahlequah.[41] The immersion facility, which has classes for youth to adults, features no English signage: even the exit signs feature a pictograph of a person running for the door rather than the English word.
The Cherokee Nation has created language lessons on the online learning platform Memrise which contain "around 1,000 Cherokee words and phrases".[42]
The family of Iroquoian languages has a unique phonological inventory. Unlike most languages, the Cherokee inventory of consonants lacks the labial sounds pronounced as //p// and pronounced as //b//. It also lacks pronounced as //f// and pronounced as //v//. Cherokee does, however, have one labial consonant, pronounced as //m//, but it is rare, appearing in no more than ten native words. In fact, the Lower dialect does not produce pronounced as //m// at all. Instead, it uses pronounced as //w//.
In the case of pronounced as //p//, (qw) pronounced as //kʷ// is often substituted, as in the name of the Cherokee Wikipedia, Cherokee: Wigi'''qw'''ediya. Some words may contain sounds not reflected in the given phonology: for instance, the modern Oklahoma use of the loanword "automobile", with the pronounced as //ɔ// and pronounced as //b// sounds of English.
As with many Iroquoian languages, Cherokee's phonemic inventory is small. The consonants for North Carolina Cherokee are 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.[43]
| Labial | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| plain | lateral | plain | labial | |||||
| Nasal | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ | ||||||
| Stop | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ | ||||
| Affricate | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ | ||||||
| Fricative | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ | ||||||
| Approximant | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ | |||||
There are two main competing orthographies, depending on how plain and aspirated stops (including affricates) are represented:
Another orthography, used in Holmes (1977), doesn't distinguish plain stops from aspirated stops for pronounced as //t͡sa// and pronounced as //kw// and uses ts and qu for both modes. Spellings working from the syllabary rather than from the sounds often behave similarly, pronounced as //t͡s// and pronounced as //kʷ// being the only two stop series not having separate letters for plain and aspirated before any vowel in Sequoyah script. Ex: Cherokee: ᏌᏊ pronounced as /chr/, Cherokee: ᏆᎾ pronounced as /chr/.
There are six short vowels and six long vowels in the Cherokee inventory. As with all Iroquoian languages, this includes a nasalized vowel. In the case of Cherokee, the nasalized vowel is a mid central vowel usually represented as v and is pronounced pronounced as /[ə̃]/, that is as a schwa vowel like the unstressed "a" in the English word "comma" plus the nasalization. It is similar to the nasalized vowel in the French word un which means "one".
| Close | pronounced as /link/ pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ pronounced as /link/ | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mid | pronounced as /link/ pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ pronounced as /link/ | |
| Open | pronounced as /link/ pronounced as /link/ |
pronounced as //u// is weakly rounded and often realized as pronounced as /[ɯ ⁓ ʉ]/.
Word-final vowels are short and nasalized, and receive an automatic high or high-falling tone: Cherokee: wado pronounced as /chr/ 'thank you'. They are often dropped in casual speech: Cherokee: gaáda pronounced as /chr/ 'dirt'. When deletion happens, trailing pronounced as //ʔ// and pronounced as //h// are also deleted and any resulting long vowel is further shortened: Cherokee: uùgoohvv́ʔi becomes Cherokee: uùgoohv́ 'he saw it'.
Short vowels are devoiced before pronounced as //h//: Cherokee: digadóhdi pronounced as /chr/. But due to the phonological rules of vowel deletion, laryngeal metathesis and laryngeal alternation (see below), this environment is relatively rare.
Sequences of two non-identical vowels are disallowed and the vowel clash must be resolved. There are four strategies depending on the phonological and morphological environments:
These make the identification of each individual morpheme often a difficult task:
Cherokee distinguishes six pitch patterns or tones, using four pitch levels. Two tones are level (low, high) and appear on short or long vowels. The other four are contour tones (rising, falling, lowfall, highrise) and appear on long vowels only.
There is no academic consensus on the notation of tone and length, although in 2011 a project began to document the use of tones in Cherokee to improve language instruction.[44] Below are the main conventions, along with the standardized IPA notation.
| Vowel length | Tone | IPA | Pulte & Feeling (1975) | Scancarelli (1986) | Montgomery-Anderson (2008, 2015) | Feeling (2003), Uchihara (2016) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Short | Low | pronounced as /˨/ | ạ² | à | a | a |
| High | pronounced as /˧/ | ạ³ | á | á | á | |
| Long | Low | pronounced as /˨/ | a² | à: | aa | aa |
| High | pronounced as /˧/ | a³ | á: | áa | áá | |
| Rising | pronounced as /˨˧/ | a²³ | ǎ: | aá | aá | |
| Falling | pronounced as /˧˨/ | a³² | â: | áà | áà | |
| Lowfall | pronounced as /˨˩/ | a¹ (= a²¹) | ȁ: | aà | àà, àa | |
| Superhigh | pronounced as /˧˦/ | a⁴ (= a³⁴) | a̋: | áá | aa̋ |
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 displays neither tone nor vowel length, but as stated earlier regarding the paucity of minimal pairs, real cases of ambiguity are rare. The same goes for transliterated Cherokee (Cherokee: osiyo for pronounced as /chr/, Cherokee: dohitsu for pronounced as /chr/, etc.), which is rarely written with any tone markers, except in dictionaries. Native speakers can tell the difference between written words based solely on context.
See main article: Cherokee 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 must contain at a minimum a pronominal prefix, a verb root, an aspect suffix, and a modal suffix, for a total of 17 verb tenses. They can also bear prepronominal prefixes, reflexive prefixes, and derivational suffixes. Given all possible combinations of affixes, each regular verb can have 21,262 inflected forms.
For example, the verb form Cherokee: gééga, 'I am going', has each of these elements:
| Cherokee: Ꭸ | Cherokee: Ꭶ | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| g- | -éé- | -g- | -a | |
| PRONOMINAL PREFIX 1 sg | VERB ROOT 'to go' | ASPECT SUFFIX present | MODAL SUFFIX | |
The pronominal prefix is Cherokee: g-, which indicates first person singular. The verb root is Cherokee: -éé-, 'to go.' The aspect suffix that this verb employs for the present-tense stem is Cherokee: -g-. The present-tense modal suffix for regular verbs in Cherokee is Cherokee: -a.
Cherokee makes three number distinctions on pronouns: singular, dual and plural. It does not make gender distinction, but does distinguish animacy in third person pronouns. Cherokee also makes the distinction between inclusive and exclusive pronouns in the first person dual and plural. There is no distinction between dual and plural in the 3rd person. This makes a total of 10 persons.
The following is the conjugation of this verb form in all 10 persons.
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. For the habitual, the aspectual prefix is Cherokee: -g- "imperfective" or "incompletive" (here identical to present, but can vary for other verbs) and the modal prefix Cherokee: -óóʼi "habitual".
Like many Native American languages, Cherokee has many pronominal prefixes that can index both subject and object. Pronominal prefixes always appear on verbs and can also appear on adjectives and nouns. There are two separate words which function as pronouns: Cherokee: aya 'I, me' and Cherokee: nihi 'you'.
| 1st person | 2nd person | 3rd person | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| set I | set II | set I | set II | set I | set II | ||
| singular | Cherokee: ji-, Cherokee: g- | Cherokee: agi-, Cherokee: agw- | Cherokee: hi-, h- | Cherokee: ja-, j- | Cherokee: ga/a-, X- | Cherokee: u-, X- | |
| dual | inclusive | Cherokee: ini-, Cherokee: in- | Cherokee: gini-, Cherokee: gin- | Cherokee: sdi-, sd- | Cherokee: desdi-, desd- | - | - |
| exclusive | Cherokee: osdi-, Cherokee: osd- | Cherokee: ogini-, Cherokee: ogin- | - | - | - | - | |
| plural | inclusive | Cherokee: idi-, Cherokee: id- | Cherokee: igi-, Cherokee: ig- | Cherokee: iji-, ij- | Cherokee: deji-, dej- | - | - |
| exclusive | Cherokee: oji-, Cherokee: oj- | Cherokee: ogi-, Cherokee: og- | - | - | Cherokee: ani-, an- | Cherokee: uni, un- | |
A Cherokee pronoun's number marks not only the agent of a verb, but often the object as well. This is the case if the depending object was already mentioned and would be substituted by a separate pronoun in English as well. Contrary to English, animacy is marked but gender is not.
(These suffixes have to be treated in a CV syllabary structure.) Set I and II join here except if written A | B.
| 1 s | 2 s | 3 s an | 3 s in | 1 d inc | 1 d exc | 2 d | 1 p inc | 1 p exc | 2 p | 3 p an | 3 p in | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 singular | - | Cherokee: gv(y)- | Cherokee: ji(y)- | Cherokee: g(e)- | - | - | Cherokee: sdv(y)- | - | - | Cherokee: ijv(y)- | Cherokee: gaji(y)- | Cherokee: deg(a)- |
| 2 singular | Cherokee: sg(w)(i)- | - | Cherokee: hi(y)- | Cherokee: h(i)- | - | Cherokee: sgini(y)- | - | - | Cherokee: isgi(y)- | - | Cherokee: gahi(y)- | Cherokee: deh(i)- |
| 3 singular (animate) | Cherokee: agw(a)- | Cherokee: j(i)- | Cherokee: g(i)- | Cherokee: g(i)- | Cherokee: gin(i)- | Cherokee: ogin(i)- | Cherokee: sd(i)- | Cherokee: ig(i)- | Cherokee: og(i)- | Cherokee: ij(i)- | deg(i)- | Cherokee: deg(i)- |
| 1 dual inclusive | - | - | Cherokee: en(i)- | Cherokee: in(i)- | - | - | - | - | - | - | Cherokee: gen(i)- | Cherokee: den(i)- |
| 1 dual exclusive | - | Cherokee: sdv(y)- | Cherokee: osd(i)- | Cherokee: osd(i)- | - | - | Cherokee: sdv(y)- | - | - | Cherokee: ijv(y)- | Cherokee: gosd(i)- | Cherokee: dosd(i)- |
| 2 dual | Cherokee: sgin(i)- | - | Cherokee: esd(i) | Cherokee: sd(i)- | - | Cherokee: sgin(i)- | - | - | Cherokee: isgi(y)- | - | Cherokee: gesd(i)- | Cherokee: desd(i)- |
| 1 plural inclusive | - | - | Cherokee: ed(i)- | Cherokee: id(i)- | - | - | - | - | - | - | Cherokee: ged(i)- | Cherokee: ded(i)- |
| 1 plural exclusive | - | Cherokee: ijv(y)- | Cherokee: oj(i)- | Cherokee: oj(i)- | - | - | Cherokee: ijv(y)- | - | - | Cherokee: ijv(y)- | Cherokee: goj(i)- | Cherokee: doj(i)- |
| 2 plural | Cherokee: isgi(y)- | - | Cherokee: ej(i)- | Cherokee: ij(i)- | - | Cherokee: isgi(y)- | - | - | Cherokee: isgi(y)- | - | Cherokee: gej(i)- | Cherokee: dej(i)- |
| 3 plural (animate) | Cherokee: gvg(w)(i)- | Cherokee: gej(i)- | Cherokee: <nowiki>an(i)- | un(i)-</nowiki> |
Languages of the World
. . 2009 . May 22, 2014 . https://web.archive.org/web/20140714194741/http://archive.ethnologue.com/16/show_language.asp?code=chr . 2014-07-14 .