Cherokee Small Letter Gi

It represents the Cherokee syllable transcribed as gi. Cherokee writing uses characters for syllables, so ꭹ forms part of a word rather than standing for a separate word or message.

The Cherokee syllabary, a writing system whose characters represent syllables, was developed by Sequoyah around 1809–1821. It let Cherokee speakers write their language and supported teaching and communication across distance. The Cherokee Phoenix newspaper began publishing Cherokee alongside English in 1828.

A historical account records an inventor from Liberia’s Bassa community examining Cherokee in 1836 while developing a syllabary. Links with the Vai and Bassa writing systems of Liberia remain debated; this connects writing-system histories, not the exact glyph ꭹ to either script. The lowercase glyph came later as a digital case partner to Ꭹ, introduced with Cherokee casing in Unicode 8.0; the syllable itself is older than that encoding.

How do I type ꭹ?

Choose a Cherokee input method with lowercase support. Cherokee layouts may use phonetic keys or map keys to syllables. To enter ꭹ exactly, the selected layout must include lowercase Cherokee; an uppercase-only layout may produce Ꭹ.

A Unicode-aware system character picker can insert ꭹ directly. Its appearance still depends on the active font.