language

Cherokee Language

Cherokee is the second most commonly used Native American language. It is spoken by 10 to 20,000 Cherokees that live in northeastern Oklahoma plus another 1000 close to the Qualla Reservation that is in North Carolina. This language is still spoken in many homes and churches where Cherokees live.

Cherokee consist of the southern branch of the Iroquoian language family. The linguistic split happened nearly 3000 years ago, when the Cherokee journeyed south. From the Great Lakes in east central North America they went to what is now Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina.

While the Aztec, Maya, Delaware, and Chippewa tribes built a hieroglyphic writing system, Cherokee was the only Native American language to have created a syllabry, a style of alphabet. A Cherokee with no knowledge of English, created the entire syllabry on his own entering the 1800s.This Cherokee

Cherokee is a detailed, well-organized language, with few separate words but has an exact system for detailing each word base. Short phrases that tell not only what happened, but how and when are called verbs. Nouns describe; an example is, a horse is so qui li, or "he carries heavy things."

The Cherokee language was split into two major languages after the Trail of Tears in 1838 to 1839. When nearly all the Cherokees were driven from their own land in the southeast to area in Texas and Oklahoma. A small number of Cherokees stayed unseen in the hills of North Carolina. Today their relatives include the eastern branch of the tribe.

With new interest in their cultural and heritage more and more Cherokees are learning the language of their ancestors. The eastern and western tribes joined beneath one government when all his hard work to protect the belongings of the Native Americans in Georgia had been unsuccessful.

The Cherokee are a North American tribe of the Iroquoian family. They played a valuable role in America and in United States history. They remain one of the biggest tribes in the United States.