Cherokee syllabary

Sequoyah, a Cherokee silversmith, created a syllabary of 85 characters, finished around 1821. Within a few years thousands of Cherokee people could read and write.

Context

Sequoyah could not read English, but he understood that writing could carry speech. After first trying a separate symbol for every word, he moved to a syllabary, in which each symbol stands for a syllable. Accounts say he began with about 86 symbols and trimmed the set to 85, borrowing the shapes of some letters from English, Greek and Hebrew without keeping their sounds.

Because Cherokee has a limited set of syllables, a syllabary was easy to learn. Contemporary observers reported that people could master it in a matter of weeks, and literacy spread quickly after its public acceptance in the early 1820s.

The Cherokee Nation adopted a written constitution in 1827, and the Cherokee Phoenix, a newspaper printed in the syllabary and English, began publication in 1828. Historians treat the syllabary as one of the few cases where a single individual is known to have created a complete, widely adopted writing system. The syllabary is still taught and used today.

The Cherokee syllabary also changed how the nation communicated across long distances and during the removal of the 1830s, since letters, laws and religious texts could be written down in the community's own language rather than in English.