Cherokee Small Letter Ta

It writes the Cherokee syllable ta. A syllabary is a writing system whose signs stand for syllables.

Sequoyah developed the Cherokee syllabary during 1815–1821 to write spoken Cherokee. The Cherokee Nation adopted it in the 1820s; Cherokee type was finalized in 1827, and the Cherokee Phoenix newspaper printed a modified form in 1828. As of 2024, the Cherokee script was still used in communities in Oklahoma and North Carolina.

Why is ꮤ a small letter?

It is the lowercase partner of the older cap-height form Ꮤ.

Traditional Cherokee text mostly used cap-height syllabary forms without a lowercase distinction. Unicode kept those established forms as uppercase and added smaller lowercase forms; ꮤ and Ꮤ are the case pair for the same syllable.

How do I type ꮤ?

Choose a Cherokee keyboard or Unicode character insertion. Cherokee layouts differ: some use Latin keys as cues, while others arrange syllables by frequency or ease of typing. In an editor with Unicode code-point insertion, enter U+ABA4.

As of 2024, fonts supported older Cherokee forms more widely than the lowercase set. If Ꮤ appears but ꮤ is a box, the active font lacks this glyph; choose a font with Cherokee lowercase coverage.