Cherokee – Sequoyah transliteration system
Cherokee virtual keyboard
The Cherokee virtual keyboard allows you to enter characters with a click of your mouse. There’s no need to change your keyboard layout anymore. The transliteration of each supported character is displayed on the right side of the character. You can then directly transliterate your text from one script to the other according to the selected transliteration system.
Language overview
Cherokee (ᏣᎳᎩ, transliterated as tsalagi) is an Iroquoian language written with a unique syllabary writing system devised by Sequoyah in 1819. It is nowadays spoken by about 20,000 people.
Transliteration system: Sequoyah
The Cherokee syllabary has been devised by Sequoyah to write the Cherokee language in 1819. After a lot of efforts and persuasion to make his invention usefulness understood by other people, his work was adopted as the official writing system by the Cherokee Nation in 1825.
Specific rules
- As the Sequoyah Syllabics system does not present any distinction between lower and upper case, the first letter of the first word of each sentence is artificially rendered as a capital letter when transliterated in Latin alphabet.
- When you transliterate a text from the Cherokee syllabary to the Latin alphabet, an invisible character (Unicode word joiner U+2060) is inserted between each transliterated syllable to enable the most accurate reverse transliteration (from the Latin alphabet to the Cherokee syllabary). But when you directly transliterate a text from the Latin alphabet to the Cherokee syllabary, as this syllables marker is not present, the produced text may not be correct.
Books
Cherokee Language Lessons
by Michael Joyner, editors lulu.com (2014)
[
Amazon.com, 
Kindle - Amazon.com]
Signs of Cherokee Culture: Sequoyah’s Syllabary in Eastern Cherokee Life
by Margaret Bender, editors The University of North Carolina Press (2007)
[ Amazon.com]
Sequoyah: The Cherokee Man Who Gave His People Writing
by James Rumford, editors Houghton Mifflin Books for Children (2004)
[ Amazon.com, Kindle - Amazon.com]
Beginning Cherokee
by Ruth Bradley Holmes, Betty Sharp Smith, editors University of Oklahoma Press (1992)
[ Amazon.com]
Cherokee links
Other supported languages
The other supported languages are: Abkhaz, Adyghe, Altai, Armenian (eastern, classical), Armenian (western), Azerbaijani (Azeri), Bashkir, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Carrier, Chuvash, Erzya, Georgian, Greek, Ingush, Inuktitut, Japanese, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Macedonian, Moldovan, Old Church Slavonic, Ossetian, Russian, Serbian, Tamazight, Tigrinya, Udmurt, Ukrainian, Vai, and Yakut.