Facts

1. Cherokee is spoken today by about fourteen thousand people in western North Carolina and northeastern Oklahoma.
2. Cherokee became a distinct language about thirty-five hundred years ago.
3. Structurally, Cherokee is a polysynthetic language.
4. Given all possible combinations of affixes, each regular verb can have 21,262 inflected forms.
5. The Cherokee writing system was devised by Sequoyah, the only person in recorded history to accomplish such a task without first being literate in at least one language.
6. Today, the Overhill dialect is maintained by about thirteen thousand people in northeastern Oklahoma. The Middle dialect is now spoken by about seven hundred people on the Qualla Boundary in North Carolina. The Lower dialect is extinct; its last speaker was encountered by the ethnologist James Mooney on the Qualla Boundary in 1888. Another dialect, which shows characteristics of both the Overhill and Middle dialects, is spoken today by about three hundred fifty people in the Snowbird Community near Robbinsville, North Carolina. Cherokee speakers constitute the seventh largest group of speakers of native languages north of Mexico, and in some communities in eastern Oklahoma and western North Carolina, Cherokee is used by speakers of all ages.

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