Language of the Cherokee

One treasure that the white man has not completely taken away from Cherokees is their language. The old ones, and now the young ones, are starting to maintain the gift of their tribal language and customs in spite of all the attempts to quell their spirit and devotion to their people and to keeping the traditions and languages alive.

There are over 200 American Indian languages being spoken today in the United States. Less than 20 of those languages are spoken by the tribal children. Only 5 of these languages are known to be thriving. In order for a language to thrive, it is necessary that it reinvent itself in a way that corresponds with the changing world. Interestingly tracing the tangled roots of American Indian languages has revealed a rather large concentration of ancient word forms from East Africa. A fact, which some anthropologists say confirms the fossil record regarding the origins of early humans on this continent. As one linguist put it, “We seem to have forgotten the lessons of the Tower of Bable, referring to the biblical tale where the monolingual sons of man were divinely cursed for their arrogance with mutually unintelligible tongues. Each language is a different and unique slice of the human experience. It’s presumptuous of us to think our verbs are better or more powerful than any others - just our economy and weaponry are.”

It is estimated that 90 percent of the 6,000 languages now spoken around the globe are likely to vanish within the next century. Though the population of American Indians and Alaska Natives grew by 40 percent between 1980 and 1990, the number of native speakers remained essentially the same. This is a disturbing sign. The current generation of American Indian children, many of them deeply assimilated into English-speaking culture, is no longer absorbing their mother tongue.

That is, not until recently, when a great number of Cherokees began an immersion program incorporating new concepts and new words into the Cherokee language did this language begin to live again. At one time children who spoke their Native American tongue were punished and looked down on or made fun of by their schoolmates, but now that is changing. In the classrooms, it is the children of Cherokee parents that are teaching the teachers about the Cherokee. “Proud to be a Cherokee’ is their motto.

The Cherokee Native language has survived only because of the dedication of a remnant of the Cherokee speakers and the efforts a man named Sequoyah who had the vision to invent a writing system for the Cherokee People. You cannot speak of the Cherokee language without mentioning Sequoyah. He is probably the greatest of all Cherokees. He is the only man in the history of mankind to develop a complete writing system without being able to read or write any other language. He was also one of the first to utilize phonics. Often mis-called an “alphabet,” his writing system actually consisted of 86 characters borrowed from the Greek and his own imagination - each one representing a Cherokee syllable. -Gregg Howard

If you don’t breathe, there is no air.
If you don’t open your eyes, there is no sky.
If you don’t listen, there are no ancestors.
If you don’t walk, there is no earth.
If you don’t speak… there is no world.
Navajo (Dineh) wisdom

“We exist in the element of language.
Someone has said that to think is to talk to oneself.
The implications of this equation are crucial.”
N. Scott Momaday - Kiowa