Sequoyah and the Syllabary

Sometime around eighteen twenty-one, a Cherokee man named Sequoyah walked into a council meeting and sat down beside his daughter, Ayokeh. He handed her a piece of paper covered in symbols he had invented, and she read aloud from it. The men in the room had never seen anything like it.

Sequoyah had done what no single person in recorded history had done before or since: invented, alone, a complete writing system for a spoken language that had never been written down. Sequoyah was born in the seventeen seventies, probably near the Overhill Cherokee town of Tuskegee, in what is now Monroe County in East Tennessee. He was a silversmith who walked with a limp.

He could not read English. For more than a decade he worked on his syllabary, a set of eighty-six characters, each representing one syllable in the Cherokee language, refining shapes, discarding letters that did not fit, starting over. His wife reportedly burned an early draft, convinced he was practicing witchcraft.

He continued. Within two years of the syllabary's introduction, thousands of Cherokee were literate in their own language. By eighteen twenty-eight, the Cherokee Phoenix newspaper was printing columns in both English and Cherokee script.

Sequoyah had given his people something no treaty could take away. The Cherokee National Council honored him in eighteen twenty-four with a silver medal, the first formal recognition of his achievement. The giant sequoia trees of California were later named by an Austrian botanist, probably in his honor.

His syllabary is still in use today.