Cherokee

Cherokee, self-named Tsalagi, is a language of the Southern branch of the Iroquoian family; its speakers' ancestors are thought to have moved from the Great Lakes into the southern Appalachians some three thousand years ago. At European contact it had three dialects. A polysynthetic tongue, Cherokee could convey a whole sentence in a single verb.

Cherokee remained purely oral until around 1809, when Sequoyah, a Cherokee who knew no writing, began devising a script. After first trying word-pictures, he settled on a syllabary of eighty-six characters, and the Cherokee Nation adopted it in 1825.

Within a few years laws, hymns and parts of the Bible appeared in print, literacy among the Cherokees surpassed that of their white neighbours, and from 1828 the bilingual Cherokee Phoenix became the first newspaper published by Native Americans in their own language.