Cherokee Small Letter E

It represents the e syllable in Cherokee writing. Cherokee uses a syllabary: each character normally stands for a whole syllable, rather than one English-style sound. This is the lowercase form used in cased Cherokee text.

By itself in an English message, ꭱ is best read as an unexplained Cherokee character. Its resemblance to a Latin letter does not give it that letter's sound or meaning.

Why was the Cherokee syllabary made?

It was created to write the Cherokee language.

The script developed in the early nineteenth century. Engravings at Red Bird River Shelter have been interpreted as experiments from an early-nineteenth-century creation, not as an ancestral script. Unicode places the script's development between 1815 and 1821; Sequoyah introduced a working syllabary in 1821, and the Cherokee Nation adopted it in 1825.

The syllabary let Cherokee speakers record their language and share writing through print. The Cherokee Phoenix was printing it in 1828. Its success also influenced James Evans's later Cree syllabics for Cree and Ojibwe, though Evans devised a different writing system.

What changed when Cherokee moved from handwriting to print?

Printing simplified the forms; digital typography later added lowercase pairs.

Sequoyah's early designs were intricate and calligraphic. Metal type led to simpler printed forms. Cherokee writing commonly appears without case distinctions or in cap-height forms; Unicode Version 8.0 added lowercase forms such as ꭱ so Cherokee text could sit alongside Latin lowercase in mixed-script typography.

ꭱ is the lowercase case counterpart of Ꭱ. Some fonts support uppercase Cherokee but not lowercase, so this letter may appear as a missing-glyph box.