Cherokee Small Letter A

It writes the Cherokee syllable listed as “a,” in lowercase.

Unlike an alphabet, the Cherokee syllabary uses a separate sign for each spoken syllable. Its chart pairs ꭰ with Ꭰ for the same syllable. Sequoyah modeled some shapes on letters printed in a Christian Bible, but assigned their values from Cherokee speech; a similar shape does not make this a Latin letter.

An archaeological reading of Red Bird River Shelter inscriptions as syllabary experiments remains contested; the marks have been proposed as early-nineteenth-century. The Cherokee Nation adopted the syllabary in 1825, and the Cherokee Phoenix newspaper printed it in 1828. Print carried Cherokee news and teaching materials during a period when Cherokee communities were dispersed and moved west. Cherokee writing appears in teaching, signs, and digital text.

Why is ꭰ lowercase?

Lowercase changes its typographic role, not its Cherokee syllable.

Older Cherokee type used forms about the height of capital letters, so the script did not make the same visual case distinction as Latin. Unicode kept those established forms as uppercase and added smaller forms for layouts that need lowercase shapes.

Use ꭰ in lowercase or mixed-case Cherokee text; Ꭰ is its uppercase partner. The pair does not mark two different syllables.

How do I type ꭰ?

Choose a Cherokee keyboard layout or your system’s Unicode input method.

Typing depends on the active layout or Unicode-entry method; a Cherokee font only draws characters already entered. The Cherokee Nation provides a syllabary keyboard layout, and its key mapping depends on the layout you enable.

If ꭰ appears as a box, the font may lack Cherokee Supplement coverage. A font with Cherokee support can display the same character.