Cherokee Language

Gerardo Mateos

TA: Vineeta Chand

Lin 1-Sec A06

17 May 2004

Cherokee: An Endangered Language

In the United States, an emphasize in learning the dominant language, English for example, can inevitably put other languages within the country in extinction. In reality, there are many other spoken languages in the United Sates, like those spoken by Native Americans, that are becoming endangered because of the immensity of more used languages. One may ask, what is an endangered language? According to Michael Cahill (Bonvillain), who has studied and researched many different endangered languages around the world, a language is endangered when "it is in fairly eminent danger of dying out." Cahill states two ways to quickly identify when a language is on its way to becoming endangered. One is when the "children in the community do not speak the native language of their parents, and the other is when there are only a small number of people left in the ethnolinguistic community" that know how to speak the language (Bonvillain). In specific, the Cherokee language fits into the category of an endangered language in the United Sates because less and less speakers speak it and because it is taught less often to younger generations as well. Although Cherokee, a language containing its own rules in grammar, morphemes, syntax, and phonetics, was once a language spoken in vast areas around the United States by native peoples, the language struggles to survive albeit historical foreign attack and current domination of other languages such as English.

The Cherokee language is spoken today by about fourteen thousand people in western North Carolina and northeastern Oklahoma. During the period in which American natives faced European invasion, three major dialects were recognized (Power Source). These dialects matched 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" (Cherokee Nation). 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. As a result, Cherokee became a distinct language, about thirty-five hundred years ago, spoken by different natives unified by the Cherokee language. It is why Cherokee is most closely related and forms a family with other native languages like the Iroquoian languages spoken today by members of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora communities of New York and Ontario. It 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," however, there are certain linguistic differences that sets Cherokee apart from other languages (Power Source). For example, Cherokee has a relatively small inventory of sounds, with only seventeen meaningful units--eleven consonants and six vowels. In addition, "two prosodic features, meaning vowel length and pitch accent, also affect meaning" (Native Languages). The absence of "bilabial stops and of labio-dental spirants (f and v sounds for example) leaves the bilabial nasal m sound as the only consonant requiring lip articulation" (Native Languages). The m sound is limited, it is only evident in fewer than ten aboriginal words. All of these are nouns with uncertain etymologies, which suggest that the m sound can be 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, come from and are similar to the sounds of other Iroquoian languages.

Cherokee, structurally speaking, is said to be a "polysynthetic language" (AllThings Cherokee). For example, in Latin, units of meaning, called morphemes, are linked together and occasionally form long words. Cherokee verbs, having the most important word type, will contain as a "minimum a pronominal prefix, a verb root, an aspect suffix, and a modal suffix" (All Things Cherokee). For example, the verb form 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 has for the present-tense stem is -k-. The present-tense modal suffix for regular verbs in Cherokee is -a. Verbs can also have pre-pronominal prefixes, reflexive prefixes, and derivative suffixes. Given all possible combinations of affixes, each regular verb can have 21,262 inflected forms (Cherokee Nation).

People, numbers, and in some cases, gender of the subject and of the objects as well, are all shown by pronominal prefixes. "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:hi atshuhtsa ki:hli, 'The boy is chasing the dogs,' and anikhe:hi atshuhtsa ki:hli 'The dogs are chasing the boy'" (Native Languages). 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. Atshuhtsa, "boy," is a singular form, whereas ki:hli, which does not have a distinct plural representation, can mean either "dog" or "dogs" (Native Languages). 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 (Native Languages).

"Five categories of aspect suffixes are discernible in Cherokee grammar: present, imperfective, perfective, imperative, and infinitive" (Cherokee Nation). The present-aspect suffixes says that the action of the verb is happening at the time of the utterance. The imperfective suffixes show lack of completive action in either the future or past. The perfective suffixes show completive action either future or past. The imperative suffixes are employed for immediate past action. As of the infinitives, they don't have a temporal association (Native Languages). A suffix occurs