Cherokee language

Cherokee (Cherokee: ᏣᎳᎩ ᎦᏬᏂᎯᏍᏗ Tsalagi Gawonihisdi) is the Native American Iroquoian language spoken by the Cherokee people. It is the only Southern Iroquoian language and differs significantly from the other Iroquoian languages. Cherokee is a polysynthetic language and uses a unique syllabary writing system.

Today, Cherokee is one of North America's healthiest indigenous languages because extensive documentation of the language exists; it is the Native American language in which the most literature has been published. Such publications include a Cherokee dictionary and grammar as well as translated portions of the New Testament of the Bible from 1850–1951, and the Cherokee Phoenix (ᏣᎳᎩ ᏧᎴᎯᏌᏅᎯ, Tsalagi Tsulehisanvhi), the first newspaper published by Native Americans in the United States and the first published in a Native American language. Significant numbers of Cherokee speakers of all ages still populate the Qualla Boundary in Cherokee, North Carolina and several counties within the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, significantly Cherokee, Sequoyah, Mayes, Adair, and Delaware. Increasing numbers of Cherokee youth are renewing interest in the traditions, history, and language of their ancestors.

Cherokee

The Cherokee (/ˈtʃɛrəkiː/; Cherokee Ani-Yuⁿwiya (ᎠᏂᏴᏫᏯ) are a Native American tribe indigenous to the Southeastern United States (principally Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina and South Carolina). They speak Cherokee, an Iroquoian language. In the 19th century, historians and ethnographers recorded their oral tradition that told of the tribe having migrated south in ancient times from the Great Lakes region, where other Iroquoian-speaking peoples were.

By the 19th century, European settlers in the United States called the Cherokee one of the "Five Civilized Tribes", because they had adopted numerous cultural and technological practices of the European American settlers. The Cherokee were one of the first, if not the first, major non-European ethnic group to become U.S. citizens. Article 8 in the 1817 treaty with the Cherokee stated Cherokees may wish to become citizens of the United States. According to the 2010 U.S. Census, the Cherokee Nation has more than 314,000 members, the largest of the 566 federally recognized Native American tribes in the United States. In addition, numerous groups claiming Cherokee lineage, some of which are state-recognized, have members who are among those 819,000-plus people claiming Cherokee ancestry on the US census.

Race

Race, RACE or "The Race" may refer to:

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Competitions

Art, entertainment, and media

Fictional characters

Film

First Language (journal)

First Language is a peer-reviewed academic journal that publishes papers three times a year in the field of Language. The journal's editor is Kevin Durkin (University of Strathclyde). It has been in publication since 1980 and is currently published by SAGE Publications.

Scope

First Language focuses on original research in child language acquisition. The journal is multidisciplinary, containing research from diverse theoretical and methodological origins. First Language contains papers from a range of disciplines such as linguistics, anthropology and neuroscience.

Abstracting and indexing

First Language is abstracted and indexed in the following databases:

External links

Language

Language is the ability to acquire and use complex systems of communication, particularly the human ability to do so, and a language is any specific example of such a system. The scientific study of language is called linguistics.

Questions concerning the philosophy of language, such as whether words can represent experience, have been debated since Gorgias and Plato in Ancient Greece. Thinkers such as Rousseau have argued that language originated from emotions while others like Kant have held that it originated from rational and logical thought. 20th-century philosophers such as Wittgenstein argued that philosophy is really the study of language. Major figures in linguistics include Ferdinand de Saussure, Noam Chomsky and William C. Stokoe.

Estimates of the number of languages in the world vary between 5,000 and 7,000. However, any precise estimate depends on a partly arbitrary distinction between languages and dialects. Natural languages are spoken or signed, but any language can be encoded into secondary media using auditory, visual, or tactile stimuli – for example, in graphic writing, braille, or whistling. This is because human language is modality-independent. Depending on philosophical perspectives regarding the definition of language and meaning, when used as a general concept, "language" may refer to the cognitive ability to learn and use systems of complex communication, or to describe the set of rules that makes up these systems, or the set of utterances that can be produced from those rules. All languages rely on the process of semiosis to relate signs to particular meanings. Oral and sign languages contain a phonological system that governs how symbols are used to form sequences known as words or morphemes, and a syntactic system that governs how words and morphemes are combined to form phrases and utterances.