5000 speak Cherokee – Yet in recent years it has experienced a remarkable revival as a second language. But what happens when entire generations may have learned to speak the language but not read or write it?
Research from the University of Kansas shows children learning to write Cherokee in an Oklahoma immersion school internalized both English and Cherokee to develop an idiosyncratic writing style.
KU researchers Lizette Peter and Tracy Hirata-Edds have worked with Tsalagi Dideloquasdi, a Cherokee immersion school in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, for several years to learn more about the revitalization of the language and how students acquire Cherokee. The recent findings are among the first studies to examine writing in the language, and the researchers found the students developed their own style of writing never seen in the language. Peter and Hirata-Edds argue it is not bad or incorrect, and it gives teachers important information to develop new approaches to help learners continue to build their bilingual skills.
“We didn’t know what to expect regarding how proficient their writing would be,” said Peter, associate professor of curriculum & teaching. “Oral language is different because you have an interlocutor, in the schools’ case, a teacher. When writing, the students have to rely on all they know about both Cherokee and English.”
Cherokee uses an orthography known as syllabary in its written form. Developed by Cherokee folk hero Sequoyah in the 1820s, it is unique among American Indian languages. The written form has many differences from English; for example, it does not use articles such as “a,” “an” or “the” before nouns, and it synthesizes morphemes to a much higher degree than English. However, when analyzing students’ writing samples and comparing them to samples of oral stories by Cherokee adults, the students often used grammatical conventions characteristic of English, such as creating an article where none was required.
Learn more about this topic by reading this article on Phys.
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