Cherokee Small Letter Tsu

It represents the Cherokee syllable usually written “tsu.”

Cherokee is written with a syllabary: each character represents a spoken syllable. “Tsu” is the usual Latin-letter rendering of this syllable, not three separate English letters. Inside a Cherokee word, neighboring syllables help carry the word’s meaning; alone, ꮷ gives only this syllable.

The Cherokee syllabary began with Sequoyah

Sequoyah developed the Cherokee syllabary between 1815 and 1821; the Cherokee Nation formally adopted it in 1825. Because each sign writes a syllable, it let Cherokee speakers write their own language and carry messages in community and public life.

Cherokee type was finalized in 1827, and the Cherokee Phoenix newspaper began publication in 1828. An April 1828 inscription in Manitou Cave records ceremonial stickball activity, a Cherokee ball game.

Early Cherokee writing did not mark uppercase and lowercase. Unicode added a lowercase set in 2015 for cased digital text; that encoding milestone is not the origin of the syllabary. Some scholars have proposed Cherokee influence on Liberia’s Vai script, but that link remains uncertain.