Cherokee language

Cherokee
Southern Iroquoian
ᏣᎳᎩ ᎦᏬᏂᎯᏍᏗ Tsalagi Gawonihisdi
Tsa-la-gi written in the Cherokee syllabary
Pronunciation	Cherokee pronunciation: [dʒalaˈɡî ɡawónihisˈdî]
Native to	North America
Region	Eastern Oklahoma; Great Smoky Mountains[1] and Qualla Boundary in North Carolina.[2] Also in Arkansas,[3] and Cherokee community in California.
Ethnicity	Cherokee
Native speakers	1520 to ~2100 (2018 and 2019)[4][5]
Language family	Iroquoian Cherokee
Writing system	Cherokee syllabary, Latin script
Official status
Official language in	Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in North Carolina, Cherokee Nation[6][7][8][9] of Oklahoma
Regulated by	United Keetoowah Band Department of Language, History, & Culture[7][8] Council of the Cherokee Nation
Language codes
ISO 639-2	chr
ISO 639-3	chr
Glottolog	cher1273
ELP	ᏣᎳᎩ (Cherokee)
Linguasphere	63-AB
Pre-contact distribution of the Cherokee language
Current geographic distribution of the Cherokee language
This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA.

This article contains Cherokee syllabic characters. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Cherokee syllabics.

Cherokee or Tsalagi (Cherokee: ᏣᎳᎩ ᎦᏬᏂᎯᏍᏗ, romanized: Tsalagi Gawonihisdi, IPA: [dʒalaˈɡî ɡawónihisˈdî]) is an endangered-to-moribund^[a] Iroquoian language^[4] and the native language of the Cherokee people.^[6][7][8] Ethnologue states that there were 1,520 Cherokee speakers out of 376,000 Cherokees in 2018,^[4] while a tally by the three Cherokee tribes in 2019 recorded about 2,100 speakers.^[5] The number of speakers is in decline. The Tahlequah Daily Press reported in 2019 that most speakers are elderly, about eight fluent speakers die each month, and that only 5 people under the age of 50 are fluent.^[11] The dialect of Cherokee in Oklahoma is "definitely endangered", and the one in North Carolina is "severely endangered" according to UNESCO.^[12] The Lower dialect, formerly spoken on the South Carolina–Georgia border, has been extinct since about 1900.^[13] The dire situation regarding the future of the two remaining dialects prompted the Tri-Council of Cherokee tribes to declare a state of emergency in June 2019, with a call to enhance revitalization efforts.^[5]

Around 200 speakers of the Eastern (also referred to as the Middle or Kituwah) dialect remain in North Carolina, and language preservation efforts include the New Kituwah Academy, a bilingual immersion school.^[14] The largest remaining group of Cherokee speakers is centered around Tahlequah, Oklahoma, where the Western (Overhill or Otali) dialect predominates. The Cherokee Immersion School (Tsalagi Tsunadeloquasdi) in Tahlequah serves children in federally recognized tribes from pre-school up to grade 6.^[15]

Cherokee, a polysynthetic language,^[16] is also the only member of the Southern Iroquoian family,^[17] and it uses a unique syllabary writing system.^[18] As a polysynthetic language, Cherokee differs dramatically from Indo-European languages such as English, French, Spanish, or Portuguese, and as such can be difficult for adult learners to acquire.^[6] A single Cherokee word can convey ideas that would require multiple English words to express, from the context of the assertion and connotations about the speaker to the idea's action and its object. The morphological complexity of the Cherokee language is best exhibited in verbs, which comprise approximately 75% of the language, as opposed to only 25% of the English language.^[6] Verbs must contain at minimum a pronominal prefix, a verb root, an aspect suffix, and a modal suffix.^[19]

Extensive documentation of the language exists, as it is the indigenous language of North America in which the most literature has been published.^[20] Such publications include a Cherokee dictionary and grammar, as well as several editions of the New Testament and Psalms of the Bible^[21] and the Cherokee Phoenix (ᏣᎳᎩ ᏧᎴᎯᏌᏅᎯ, Tsalagi Tsulehisanvhi), the first newspaper published by Native Americans in the United States and the first published in a Native American language.^[22][23]

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