Cherokee Syllabary

Cherokee is written with a syllabary, not an alphabet: each letter stands for a whole syllable, a consonant plus a vowel, so a word like ᏣᎳᎩ Tsalagi takes three letters, not seven. The chart is a grid. Across the top run the six vowels, Ꭰ a, Ꭱ e, Ꭲ i, Ꭳ o, Ꭴ u and Ꭵ v, where v is not the English letter but the Cherokee romanisation of a nasal 'uh' as in 'uh-huh'. Down the side run the consonants in the order Cherokee classes teach them: g, h, l, m, n, qu, s, d, dl, ts, w, y. Reading a row gives you the syllables: Ꮃ la, Ꮄ le, Ꮅ li, Ꮆ lo, Ꮇ lu, Ꮈ lv. Text runs left to right in lines, like English, and modern writers separate words with spaces and use ordinary Western punctuation.

A few letters do not fit the grid, and the printed chart squeezes them into the same rows. Ꭷ ka sits beside Ꭶ ga because Cherokee distinguishes a plain g-like stop from an aspirated k-like one only in the a column; in the same way Ꮤ ta, Ꮦ te and Ꮨ ti sit beside Ꮣ da, Ꮥ de and Ꮧ di, and Ꮭ tla beside Ꮬ dla. Ꮏ hna and Ꮐ nah are alternatives to Ꮎ na, and Ꮝ s is the one letter with no vowel at all: it writes the s that begins clusters, as in ᏍᏏᏉᏯ Ssiquoya, Sequoyah's own name. Count them all and you reach 85, the number every learner memorises. The row for qu is pronounced kw (Ꮖ qua is 'kwa'), the dl/tl row is a lateral sound made with the tongue at the sides, and the ts row is 'ts' in the Eastern dialect spoken in North Carolina but 'j' or 'ch' in Oklahoma, which is why Cherokee is Tsalagi for some speakers and Jalagi for others.

The biggest trap for newcomers is that the printed letters look like Latin, Greek or Cyrillic letters and never sound like them. Ꭰ looks like D but reads a, Ꭱ looks like R but reads e, Ꭲ is i not T, Ꭺ is go not A, Ꭼ is gv not E, Ꭻ is gu not J, Ꮃ is la not W, Ꮇ is lu not M, Ꮋ is mi not H, Ꮓ is no not Z, Ꮪ is du not S, Ꮲ is tlv not P and Ꮯ is tli not C. There is no letter-for-letter 'Cherokee alphabet a to z': to write anything you break the word into syllables first, then look each one up in the chart.

Sequoyah and the invention of the Cherokee writing system

The syllabary was created by one man. Sequoyah (ᏍᏏᏉᏯ, also known as George Guess or Gist, about 1770 to 1843), a Cherokee silversmith and blacksmith, could neither read nor speak English, but he had watched settlers pass messages on 'talking leaves' and set out around 1809 to give Cherokee the same power. He first tried a sign for every word, found there were far too many, and then worked out that every Cherokee word is built from a limited stock of syllables. Twelve years of work, done against ridicule from neighbours who thought him mad or dabbling in witchcraft, produced the 85 (originally 86) characters. In 1821 he demonstrated the system with his young daughter Ayokeh: Cherokee leaders dictated words to one of them while the other was out of earshot, and the written page was read back exactly. It is the only known case of a member of a non-literate people single-handedly inventing a complete writing system that his nation then adopted.

The syllabary spread with astonishing speed, because a Cherokee speaker could learn it in days: each letter is simply a syllable you already say. Within a few years a large share of the Cherokee Nation could read and write, a literacy rate often said to have been higher than that of their white neighbours. The Cherokee National Council formally adopted the script in 1825. For printing, the missionary Samuel Worcester and the Cherokee editor Elias Boudinot had type cast in 1827, and the typefounders reshaped Sequoyah's flowing handwritten signs to resemble the Latin, Greek and Cyrillic type they had on hand. That is where the look-alike shapes in the chart come from; Sequoyah's own hand looked quite different. On 21 February 1828 the Cherokee Phoenix (ᏣᎳᎩ ᏧᎴᎯᏌᏅᎯ, Tsalagi Tsulehisanvhi) appeared at New Echota, Georgia, the first newspaper published by Native Americans, with columns in Cherokee and English side by side.

The script survived the catastrophe that followed. After the forced removal of 1838 and 1839, the Trail of Tears, the Cherokee Nation rebuilt itself at Tahlequah in what is now Oklahoma and started a new bilingual paper, the Cherokee Advocate, in 1844. Sequoyah himself died in 1843 in Mexico while searching for a band of Cherokee who had settled there. Oklahoma later placed his statue in the National Statuary Hall of the United States Capitol, and the Cherokee Nation's seal carries the syllabary to this day.

Who writes Cherokee today

Cherokee (ᏣᎳᎩ ᎦᏬᏂᎯᏍᏗ, Tsalagi Gawonihisdi) is the language of three federally recognised tribes: the Cherokee Nation and the United Keetoowah Band, both based in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians on the Qualla Boundary in the mountains of western North Carolina. It is an Iroquoian language, a distant relative of Mohawk and Seneca, and it is endangered: in June 2019 the three tribes jointly declared a state of emergency for the language, with roughly two thousand fluent first-language speakers remaining, most of them elderly. The syllabary is central to the response. The Cherokee Nation Immersion School in Tahlequah, open since 2001, teaches children to read and write in the syllabary from kindergarten, as does the Eastern Band's New Kituwah Academy in Cherokee, North Carolina; adult classes, online courses and a Cherokee Nation translation department feed a steady stream of new material.

You meet the letters in daily life across the Cherokee homelands: on bilingual street signs and public buildings in Tahlequah, on the masthead of the Cherokee Phoenix, which still publishes, on tribal seals, licence plates, church hymnals and the Cherokee New Testament, printed in the syllabary since the 19th century. Cherokee speakers also text and post in it. Since 2010 the syllabary has had a built-in keyboard on the iPhone, since 2012 a full Windows interface and Gmail in Cherokee, and Cherokee Nation's language technologists have pushed the script onto Android phones, Google products and a Cherokee-language Wikipedia. The Cherokee hymnbook printed in 1829 and the medicine texts that 19th-century Cherokee healers wrote in syllabary in private notebooks show how deeply the script became the people's own within a generation of its invention.

If you are using these letters, use them as Cherokee writing. The syllabary is not a set of decorative 'Native American symbols', and most of what the web calls 'Cherokee symbols of protection' or 'Cherokee symbols for strength' are modern inventions unrelated to the script. A Cherokee word in the syllabary is a real word in a living language; pick it from a dictionary or a speaker, check it, and spell it in the chart.

Small letters and the Cherokee Unicode blocks

The 85 letters entered Unicode in version 3.0 (1999) in the Cherokee block, U+13A0 to U+13F4, so Ꭰ is U+13A0 and Ᏼ yv is U+13F4. Until 2015 the script was treated as having no case at all. In practice, though, Cherokee printers and the Cherokee Nation had begun to write running text in smaller letters with a full-size letter at the start of a sentence or a name, exactly as English does, often by shrinking the font by hand. Unicode 8.0 (June 2015) made this official: it added small letters for all 86 forms, six of them in the original block at U+13F8 to U+13FD (ᏸ ᏹ ᏺ ᏻ ᏼ ᏽ, the small ye yi yo yu yv mv) and the other eighty in a new Cherokee Supplement block, U+AB70 to U+ABBF, from ꭰ a to ꮿ ya. The same release restored Ᏽ mv (U+13F5), the letter Sequoyah included but modern Cherokee dropped.

Because the existing letters were already in use everywhere, Unicode declared them the capitals and the new ones the small letters, and it folds case towards uppercase rather than lowercase, so that old Cherokee text and search indexes keep working. Cherokee is the only script in Unicode where case folding works that way. For you as a writer this means two things. The capitals in the first chart are what every Cherokee font, keyboard and website has supported since 1999, so they are the safe choice for a name, a tattoo or a bio. The small letters give you proper mixed-case Cherokee prose, Ꮳꮃꭹ for Tsalagi with only the first letter capital, but only where the font has them: the free Noto Sans Cherokee does, while fonts made before 2015, such as the original Plantagenet Cherokee that shipped with Windows and macOS for years, have only the capitals and show boxes for the rest.

One more pitfall: because the letters look Latin, people sometimes use them as fancy text, writing 'ᎠᏢᏢᏞ' for APPLE. Cherokee readers see a-tlv-tlv-tle, a nonsense word, and the lookalike letters break screen readers, search and copy-paste for everyone. If you want decorated Latin letters, the Bold Letters, Gothic Letters or Faux Cyrillic Letters collections are made for that; keep the syllabary for Cherokee.

How to type Cherokee letters and write words in the syllabary

Tap any letter in the chart to copy it, or copy whole words from this page: ᎣᏏᏲ osiyo 'hello', ᏩᏙ wado 'thank you', ᏙᎾᏓᎪᎲᎢ donadagohvi 'until we meet again'. To type Cherokee yourself, every major platform has a keyboard. iPhone and iPad list Cherokee under Settings, General, Keyboard. Android gets it through Gboard. Windows has two layouts under Cherokee in Time and Language settings, Cherokee Nation (one key per letter, matching the chart) and Cherokee Phonetic, where you type the romanisation and 'osiyo' becomes ᎣᏏᏲ as you go. macOS offers Cherokee Nation and Cherokee QWERTY keyboards in the same way. In Microsoft Word, type a code and press Alt+X: 13A0 Alt+X gives Ꭰ. Fonts: Plantagenet Cherokee and Gadugi come with Windows, Plantagenet Cherokee with macOS, and Noto Sans Cherokee is a free download that covers both cases.

Writing a name or an English word in the syllabary is transcription by syllable, and Cherokee has fewer sounds than English: no b, f, p, r, v, th or sh, and nearly every syllable ends in a vowel. Cherokee speakers adapt names the way they always have. Anna is ᎠᎾ a-na, Lisa ᎵᏌ li-sa, Mary becomes ᎺᎵ Meli, and a word ending in a consonant takes a vowel or drops the sound. Because 'r' becomes 'l' and 'p' and 'b' become 'qu' or 'w', a direct letter-swap is impossible; a 'Cherokee alphabet translator' that maps a to Ꭰ and b to Ꭱ is just substituting lookalike shapes. For anything permanent, the Cherokee Nation's online dictionary and language department, or a speaker, will tell you how the name is actually written.

The chart is also the learning tool. Cherokee classes drill it row by row, vowels first, chanting the syllables to a tune (the 'Cherokee syllabary song' that many learners search for), and then read short words: ᎠᎹ ama 'water', ᏅᏓ nvda 'sun', ᎡᎶᎯ elohi 'earth', ᎦᏚᎩ gadugi 'working together', ᎤᎵᎮᎵᏍᏗ ulihelisdi 'welcome'. Reading each new word against the grid is how the 85 shapes become automatic within a few weeks.