Sequoyah, also known as George Gist or George Guess, was a Native American polymath and neographer of the Cherokee Nation. In 1821, he completed his independent creation of the Cherokee syllabary, enabling reading and writing in Cherokee. His achievement was one of the few times in recorded history that an individual member of a pre-literate group created an original, effective writing system. His creation of the syllabary turned the Cherokee nation into one of the first North American Indigenous groups with a written language. Sequoyah was also an important representative for the Cherokee nation; he went to Washington, D.C., to sign two relocation-and-land-trading treaties.
SE-QUO-YAH – a lithograph from History of the Indian Tribes of North America. This lithograph is from the portrait painted by Charles Bird King in 1828.
Carnegie Museum of Art, Architecture Hall, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Sequoyah Alphabet
Statue of Sequoyah in United States Capitol
Sequoyah Memorial in front of the Cherokee Museum in North Carolina
Cherokee or Tsalagi is an endangered-to-moribund Iroquoian language and the native language of the Cherokee people. Ethnologue states that there were 1,520 Cherokee speakers out of 376,000 Cherokees in 2018, while a tally by the three Cherokee tribes in 2019 recorded about 2,100 speakers. The number of speakers is in decline. The Tahlequah Daily Press reported in 2019 that most speakers are elderly, about eight fluent speakers die each month, and that only 5 people under the age of 50 are fluent. The dialect of Cherokee in Oklahoma is "definitely endangered", and the one in North Carolina is "severely endangered" according to UNESCO. The Lower dialect, formerly spoken on the South Carolina–Georgia border, has been extinct since about 1900. The dire situation regarding the future of the two remaining dialects prompted the Tri-Council of Cherokee tribes to declare a state of emergency in June 2019, with a call to enhance revitalization efforts.
Bible cover in Cherokee script
Translation of Genesis into the Cherokee language, 1856
A sign in Tahlequah, Oklahoma in English and Cherokee (transcription: ᏓᎵᏊ ᎪᏪᎵ ᏧᏂᏍᏚᎢᏍᏗ – "daliquu goweli tsunisduisdi")
Tsali Boulevard (transcription: ᏣᎵ ᏧᏩᏐᎯᏍᏗ – "tsali tsuwasohisdi") in Cherokee, North Carolina