Cherokee/Vowels

Vowel Sounds

The Cherokee language includes six vowel sounds.

• [ɑ] is pronounced “ah” as in “father” or “water” (ex. ᎠᎹ (ama), meaning “water”).
• [e] is pronounced “eh” or “ay” as in “egg” or “lane” (ex. ᏎᎷ (selu), meaning “corn”).
• [i] is pronounced “ee” as in “tree” (ex. ᏏᏲ (siyo), meaning “hello”).
• [o] is pronounced “oh” as in “hello” (ex. ᎣᎩᎾᎵᎢ (oginaliʔi), roughly meaning “my friends”); very little rounding occurs when pronouncing this vowel in Cherokee
• [u] is pronounced “oo” as in “blue” (ex. ᎤᏔᎾ (utana), meaning “big”); very little rounding this vowel in Cherokee and is often pronounced more like [ɯ ~ ʉ]
• [ə͂ ~ ʌ̃] is pronounced like “uh” as in “butter”, but nasalized, similar to the French sound un (ex. ᎥᏝ (vtla), meaning “no”)

In the beginning and middle of a word, only one of the vowels is nasalized. The last vowel of the word is always nasal. These vowels cannot be combined to form diphthongs.

Notable Features of Final Vowels

Remember that three phenomena occur on word-final vowels in Cherokee.

First, the final vowel in a word (i.e. the final syllable) is short in length and takes a special high-falling tone specifically used on final vowels and nowhere else. (On the five-number pitch indication system it is represented by “43”.) Only a handful of words are exceptions to this, and when they are introduced they will be marked accordingly. However, for the vast majority of words that do follow this rule, you will notice that none of the orthographies mark the final syllable for tone, for the tone is predictable.

Second, note that the final vowel of a word is nasalized. /v/ is already nasalized, so in final position it is unaffected (simply keeping its nasalization), but the other five vowels become their nasalized versions.

Third, final vowels are often dropped in speech. If the consonant preceding the final vowel is /h/—in other words if the final syllable starts with /h/—then that whole syllable can be dropped

Vowel Length

Along with tone, Cherokee vowels also have length as a property.

Vowels can be short or long in Cherokee. The distinction is important and has implications for morphology (i.e. the part of grammar dealing with how words change form). Many current resources unfortunately ignore the length distinction.

If you speak American English, vowel length may be difficult to grasp since it is not a contrastive feature. (Australians might have a better instinctive grasp of it—compare the short vowel in “cut” with the long vowel of the same quality in “cart”; alternatively compare “ferry” and “fairy”.)

Nonetheless, if you wish to develop proficiency in Cherokee, internalizing vowel length distinctions is a must. As an exercise, I recommend clapping each syllable while saying a word (or in lieu of saying a word) to consciously hear the rhythm of the word. Long vowels get a long clap (or clap-and-hold) and short vowels get a short clap.

In this book, long vowels are written with double letters as an the "ii" of "giihli," meaning dog.

By convention, vowels with the superhigh tone are written here with a single letter and the tilde diacritic. This is because vowels with this tone are always long, so there is no need to distinguish length in writing, hence just a single letter. E.g. "õsda," meaning good.

Similarly, vowels with the lowfall tone are also always long. In pronominal prefixes, these vowels are written with single or double letters depending on the underlying vowel length before a phonological process assigns the tone. Otherwise, when the vowel does not occur in a pronominal prefix, double letters are always used, since the underlying length is less important.