Widespread literacy, quickly

 In the 1820s, literacy rates among Cherokee people in Georgia were higher than those for whites.

It’s a remarkable fact, considering that the written language had just been devised by Sequoyah.

Sequoyah, who was past 50, was talking with other Cherokee men when someone suggested that whites had abilities that Cherokees simply lacked.

Sequoyah said there was nothing magic about those people. Sequoyah’s family had been driven from their lands in East Tennessee. He had such a low opinion of whites that he crossed the Mississippi.

Well, one of the men said, whites had devised a written language. They could communicate using marks on paper.

Anyone could do that, Sequoyah replied.

The men realized that was a verifiable claim; it could be proved or disproved.

Sequoyah, who could not read or write any language, was on the spot. He tried making a symbol for every Cherokee word but quickly realized that would be difficult, something akin to learning Chinese characters. He then played with the Roman alphabet, using a letter to represent each discrete sound or phoneme of spoken Cherokee. But that procedure struck him as hard to use and hard to learn.

He came up with a syllabary instead of an alphabet. Each character stands for syllable, rather than for a phoneme. The word “Cherokee” (tsa-la-gi or ja-la-gi, depending on dialect) has three syllables, so the word is written with three characters.

Sequoyah came up with 86 symbols, one of which has been dropped.

Here’s the interesting thing: If you have a language with thousands of characters, like Chinese, it takes a while to learn to read and write it, even if you’re a native speaker. If you have a language with just 26 letters, like English, it still takes a while to learn to read and write.

But if you have a written language based on syllables, it takes a couple of weeks. Learning to speak Cherokee takes a while. But if you can speak it, you can learn to use the syllabary quickly.

Around 1800, about 15,000 Cherokee lived in Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee and North Carolina. They were surrounded by a million whites whose record for taking land was not admirable. The Cherokee badly needed a unified nation, and to achieve that unity they needed a written language that most people could learn quickly.

Astonishingly, they got it.

• Sources and notes: Kathleen DuVal, Native Nations; New York: Random House, 2024, pp. 377-9.

Stone Mountain is in what was Creek of Muscogee territory, south of the Cherokee Nation, headquartered at New Echota. Having spent a lifetime in Texas, I know something of its natural history and of the history of its original peoples. In Georgia, I’m an old dog having to learn new things to get my bearings.