Cherokee is an Iroquoian language, and the only Southern Iroquoian language spoken today. Linguists believe that the Cherokee people migrated to the southeast from the Great Lakes region about three thousand years ago, bringing with

The language remains concentrated in some Oklahoma communities and communities like Big Cove and Snowbird in North Carolina.
Dialects

The family of Iroquoian languages has a unique phonological inventory. Unlike most languages, the Cherokee inventory of consonants lacks the labial sounds p, b, f, and v. Cherokee does, however, have one labial consonant m, but it is rare, appearing in no more than ten native

Cherokee is written in an 85-character syllabary invented by Sequoyah (also known as Guest or George Gist). Many of the letters resemble the

Literacy
Before the development of the Cherokee syllabary in the 1820s, Cherokee was an oral language only. The Cherokee syllabary is a set of written symbols invented by Sequoyah in the late 1810s and early 1820s to write the

In 2019, the Tri-Council of Cherokee tribes declared a state of emergency for the language due to the threat of it going extinct, calling for the enhancement of revitalization programs. The language retains about 1,500 to 2,100 Cherokee speakers, but an average

Cherokee, like many Native American languages, is polysynthetic, meaning that many morphemes may be linked together to form a single word,