An Illiterate Man Invented an Entire Writing System

Sequoyah, a Cherokee silversmith born around the 1770s, spoke only Cherokee and could not read or write in any language. He never learned the Latin alphabet, never mastered English letters, and had no model of literacy in his own tongue. What he did have was a conviction that the “talking leaves” of European settlers held real power.

Working largely alone for roughly a decade, he broke spoken Cherokee into its individual syllables and assigned each one a symbol. The finished syllabary used about 85 characters, each standing for a whole syllable rather than a single sound.

One man, with no written language of his own, gave a nation the ability to write.

He introduced the system in 1821, and the Cherokee Nation formally adopted it in 1825. Because the script matched the spoken language so closely, it could be learned in weeks, and literacy spread rapidly across the Nation. Within a few years the Cherokee were printing books and, by 1828, a bilingual newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix.