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The Cherokee Alphabet And How To Use It
Or: How to write in Cherokee symbols if you've never heard of a syllabary before

We get a lot of confused email asking how to use the Cherokee alphabet, so here is a tutorial that should hopefully clear things up for beginning Cherokee language learners.

First, the Cherokee alphabet is technically not an alphabet, but a syllabary. That means each Cherokee symbol represents a syllable, not just a consonant or a vowel. So using the English alphabet, ama ("water" in Cherokee) is written with three letters: a, m, and a. Using the Cherokee syllabary, the same word is written with only two characters,

and

(pronounced "a" and "ma.")

For this reason, Cherokee symbols are usually arranged in chart form, with one column for each Cherokee vowel and one row for each Cherokee consonant:

So if you're looking for the Cherokee symbol for "li," you go down the chart to the "L" row (fourth from the top) and across to the "I" row (third from the left.) Except for "s" (

), every Cherokee syllable begins with a consonant and ends with a vowel (some have a "silent i," but you don't need to worry about that yet,) so it's very easy to get the hang of.

Note that in Cherokee, as in English, symbols are written left to right.

The Cherokee Alphabet And How To Use It Or: How to write in Cherokee symbols if you've never heard of a syllabary before

Further reading:

The Cherokee Alphabet And How To Use It
Or: How to write in Cherokee symbols if you've never heard of a syllabary before