Cherokee on a smartphone: Part of a drive to save a language

[turbinetree]

By MATT O'BRIEN
yesterday

By itself, being able to read smartphone home screens in Cherokee won’t be enough to safeguard the Indigenous language, endangered after a long history of erasure. But it might be a step toward immersing younger tribal citizens in the language spoken by a dwindling number of their elders.

That’s the hope of Principal Chief Richard Sneed of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, who’s counting on more inclusive consumer technology — and the involvement of a major tech company — to help out.

Sneed and other Cherokee leaders have spent several months consulting with Lenovo-owned Motorola, which last week introduced a Cherokee language interface on its newest line of phones. Now phone users will be able to find apps and toggle settings using the syllable-based written form of the language first created by the Cherokee Nation’s Sequoyah in the early 1800s. It will appear on the company’s high-end Edge Plus phones when they go on sale in the spring.

https://apnews.com/article/technology-business-language-smartphones-0d6adb7874de0146121a2e337b9c85e3

[Karadeniz]

1. I hope they're successful... languages must be saved !

[electric_blue68]

2. Sounds good to help keep the language alive 👍

[flyingfysh]

3. I saw a video about this effort a few years ago

School kids are now sending text messages to each other on Apple iPhones - in Cherokee. And the old people have no trouble at all reading these messages.

The alphabet is interesting, because it was entirely invented by one person: Sequoyah. It is not an alphabetical system; rather, each character represents a different syllable. Within a few months almost the entire Cherokee population could read and write. Street signs in Tallequah, Oklahoma (capital of the Cherokee Nation), are in both English and Cherokee.