Cherokee Small Letter Mo

It writes the Cherokee syllable “mo.” Cherokee uses a syllabary — one sign per whole syllable — so ꮌ stands for that sound and nothing more. It is neither a Latin “m” nor an emoji.

Cherokee is an Iroquoian language, kin to Seneca and Mohawk, but the syllabary itself was invented from scratch for that one language. Inside it, ꮌ sits in the m-row alongside ꮉ ma, ꮊ me, ꮋ mi, and ꮍ mu.

Case came late: the script ran single-case for almost two centuries until Unicode 8.0 added lowercase in 2015. Software still folds ꮌ back to the uppercase Ꮌ for searching and sorting, which is why the pair turns up interchangeably in fonts and documents.

Why was the Cherokee syllabary made?

Sequoyah devised it so Cherokee speakers could write their own language. The work ran 1815–1821, and the Cherokee Nation adopted the syllabary in 1825.

Printing followed fast: Cherokee type was finalized in 1827, partly by adapting Latin type shapes — one reason some signs echo Latin letters while sharing none of their sounds.

From 1828 the Cherokee Phoenix newspaper printed Cherokee beside English — news, laws, political argument, even personal messages — through the crisis of forced removal. In the 21st century the syllabary still fills classroom walls and public signs.