Cherokee is spoken today by about fourteen thousand people in western North Carolina and northeastern Oklahoma. At the time of European contacts, three major dialects were recognized. These corresponded roughly to the three main geographical divisions of the Cherokee Nation. The Lower or Elati dialect was spoken in what is now northwestern South Carolina and the adjacent area of Georgia. The Middle or Kituhwa dialect was spoken in most of western North Carolina. The Overhill or Otali dialect was spoken in all the towns of East Tennessee and in the towns along the Hiwassee and Cheowa Rivers in North Carolina, as well as in northeastern Alabama and northwestern Georgia during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
———Cherokee became a distinct language about thirty-five hundred years ago. It is most likely related to the Iroquoian languages spoken today by members of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora communities of New York and Ontario. Cherokee is also related to a number of Iroquoian languages that became extinct during the historic period.
———Even with the great temporal and spatial separation between Cherokee and the other Iroquoian languages, they do share some common features that led writers, as early as the eighteenth century, to suggest intrafamilial relationships. For example, the Iroquoian family is one of the few languages in the world that has no bilabial stops (b and p sounds). This characteristic is quite distinct from neighboring Algonquian and Muskogean languages. Also the Iroquoian pronominal prefixes, which are employed in every Cherokee sentence, share some easily recognizable cognates.
———Cherokee has a relatively small inventory of sounds, with only seventeen meaningful units — eleven consonants and six vowels. In addition, two prosodic features, absence of bilabial stops and of labio-dental spirants (f and v sounds) leaves the bilabial nasal m sound as the only consonant requiring lip articulation. The m sound has very limited distribution, occurring in fewer than ten aboriginal words. All of these are uninflected nouns with uncertain etymologies, suggesting that the m sound is a relatively recent addition to Cherokee. As a result, Cherokee does not have the Staccato sound of English or German. All other meaningful units of sound, or phonemes, constitute regularly occurring correspondences with sounds of other Iroquoian languages.
———Structurally, Cherokee is a polysynthetic language. As in the case of German or Latin units of meanings, called morphemes, are linked together and occasionally form very long words. Cherokee verbs, constituting the most important word type, must contain as a minimum modal suffix. For example, the verb from ke:ka, "I am going," has each of these elements. The pronominal prefix is k-, which indicates first person singular. The verb root is -e, "to go." The aspect suffix that this verb employs for the present-time stem is -k-. The present-tense modal suffix for regular verbs in Cherokee is -a. Verbs can also have prepronominal prefixes, reflexive prefixes, and derivative suffixes. Given all possible combinations of affixes, each regular verb can have 21,262 inflected forms.
———The pronominal prefixes convey the person, number, and, in some cases, gender of both the subject and object of the verb. Except in cases where the subject and object are of the same person and number, the agreement rule serves to clarify the grammatical functions of nouns, as in the following sentences: takhe:he atshuhtsa ki:hli, "The boy is chasing the dogs," and Anikehe:hi Atshuhtsa Ki:hli "The dogs are chasing the boy." In the first sentence ta-, the pronominal prefix of the verb, indicates that the subject of the verb is singular and the object of the verb is plural. Ashuhtsa, "boy," is a singular form, whereas ki:hli, which does not have a distinct plural representation, can mean either "dog" or "dogs." Therefore the subject of the first sentence can only be "boy." By the same reasoning the subject of the second sentence must be "dogs," since the pronominal prefix ani- indicates that the subject is plural and the object is singular.
———Five categories of aspect suffixes are discernible in Cherokee grammar: present, inperfective, perfective, imperative, and infinitive. The present-aspect suffixes indicate that the action of the verb is happening at the time of the utterance. The inperfective suffixes convey noncompletive action in either the future or past. The imperative suffixes are employed for immediate past action. The infinitive have no temporal association.
———A modal suffix occurs in final position in all Cherokee verbs. With the exception of the suffixes added to the present and imperative stems, no class distinction is recognized by the modals. Seven of the eleven modal suffixes can be added to either the perfective or imperfective stems. Two of these distinguish between actions witnessed by the speaker and those reported to him. Others relate habitual action, intentive action, participle forms, and so forth. Cherokee also has classificatory verbs that convey not only action but the nature of the object or recipient of the action — for example, whether that object is round, flexible, long and rigid, liquid, or animate. More than forty sets of Classificatory verbs have been identified.
———All words that contain two or more morphemes are subject to morphophonemic rules. The most important of these is the epenthesis rule, which breaks up impermissible consonant or vowel clusters. Cherokee sentences are also subject to numerous syntactic rules. One rule, found in every sentence, requires that the pronominal prefix of the verb agree in person and number — and gender, when applicable — with both the subject and the object. Because of this rule, word order is not as rigid in Cherokee as in English.
———The Cherokee writing system was devised by Sequoyah, the only person in recorded history to accomplish such a task without first being literate in at least one language. Seventy-eight of the eighty-five combinations; the remainder represent the six vowels and the consonant s.
———Today, the Overhill dialect is maintained by about thirteen thousand people in northern Oklahoma. The middle dialect is now spoken by about seven hundred people on the Qualla Boundary in North Carolina. The Lower dialect is extinct; its last speaker was encountered by the ethnologist James Monney on the Qualla Boundary in 1888. Another dialect, which shows characteristics of both the Overhill and Middle dialects, is spoken today by about three hundred fifty people in the Snowbird Community near Robbinsville, North Carolina. Cherokee speakers constitute the seventh largest group of speakers of native languages north of Mexico, and in some communities in eastern Oklahoma and western North Carolina is used by speakers of all ages.

DUANE H. KING (Cherokee)
Southwest Museum, Los Angeles