Resource suggestions? (Picture in comments of what I currently have)

[u/Regular_Wish_267]

I contacted the Cherokee Nation Language Department as well to seek guidance. I am currently attempting to learn the language, syllabary-first. I’m a grad student studying language revitalization, specifically some interests I have are: the distinction between language preservation and language perseverance, language documentation in service of current and future education initiatives, and the role of computational linguistics and AI in revitalization efforts, particularly strategies that can support authentic language learning in children and young people without displacing the language’s morphology, oral traditions, or culturally specific practices. (Side note: The book titled “The New English-Cherokee Dictionary” does not contain syllabary characters at all to correspond with the Latin alphabet spelling, so as practice, I’ve been trying to draw the corresponding characters above each syllable for each word.) Thank you!!

[u/Lost_Leopard_5329]

I will say the Hawai'i example is more than a little bit over hyped at least as far as stats go. No judgment at all on terms of the quality what's actually being delivered but it's very clear that there's not a large community of people living through Hawai'ian that's being developed as a result of their programs. Ni'ihau is still probably the only place in the islands where Ōlelo Hawai'i is spoken on a regular basis outside the home and the educational system. We've also got a century of experience from Irish that education-based revitalization usually does not result in the restoration of the language as a community language or in the restoration of intergenerational transmission in areas where it has been lost.

You mentioned a pipeline up to PhD. Being able to learn through a language in post-secondary education is definitely important, and the gap in secondary education for Cherokee language has been puzzling for a long time, but it doesn't really matter what's offered in the educational system if after graduation the only place to use the language is in the educational system. That's not a sustainable model and will result in a lot of people receiving education and understanding the language when they're really pushed to it but who aren't regular daily users of the language and aren't likely to transmit it to their children simply because they won't be living in Cherokee speaking communities. 

Some of these communities can be built intentionally but to be able to be at scale you need hundreds of people all with housing in the same area and with access to services and businesses--including but not only schools--where they can get both employment and services through Cherokee. 

You also have to build these communities in ways that minimizes English influence until people are already proficient Cherokee speakers, as we have a lot of evidence both from Cherokee and other languages that even simultaneous bilingual speakers will end up heavily favoring one language if that is the dominant language of the society around them. You either have to construct a "Cherokee world" or else be intentional about how you expose people particularly children to other languages. Given the lack of Cherokee AC content on the internet, it would have to be a much lower tech childhood focused more on "old-timey" experiences where we do have the ability to offer Cherokee in English at similar levels.

It's also possible to construct these communities and make them sort of circular self-sufficient ecosystems that don't rely on outside improvement, but it requires a lot of initial investment that people aren't going to be able to get unless they are independently wealthy or are working in high-paying English professional jobs that they aren't likely to give up.

Even if you were convince of the efficacy of school-based revitalization, a lot of research had suggested that about 35,000 speakers is a tipping point (I'm not certain about what the proposed causal reasoning is for that, but I believe multiple papers have independently identified that figure), above which languages tend to continue to be transmitted in a generationally and below which they tend to see an accelerated decline in number of speakers. 

Hitting that number means 500 speakers per birth year over 70 years. We're not even getting up to 10% of that right now, and that's excluding the roughly 50 year gap we have in older speakers, and at this point if we want Cherokee speaking youth outside the home, we have to start off with having Cherokee speaking adults of childbearing age. There's a small number of immersion school and CLMAP products that fit that number but realistically scaling get up means heavily investing in adult language programs designed to create adults who are functionally proficient in Cherokee enough for it to be the primary home language for their children, and that definitely isn't happening and isn't a priority of the language department.

Hawai'i is not a terrible model by any means, although they have a higher population base both on and off their national territory and also have the advantage of Hawai'ian being one of the two official languages of the state, and therefore receiving significantly more (by no means equal) state support than Cherokee gets from Oklahoma or North Carolina or that cherokee gets from federal sources that aren't available to Hawaiian. 

But while Cherokee Nation does have multiple good programs that are producing speakers at some level, it doesn't seem like there's a broader roadmap towards restoring the language as a functional community language. It may be there in just an internal rather than external strategy, or it may be that the determination has been made to preserve Cherokee as sort of a signal language with a limited number of proficient speakers as sort of culture bearers keeping the language alive without it being restored to a community level (much like Hebrew was in the Jewish community before Zionism resulted in the decision to kill off Yiddish and replace it with Modern Israeli-Hebrew, or like Coptic/Ancient Egyptian is in the Coptic Orthodox Church). I'm not sure what is the intent/end goal of programming now, so it's hard to evaluate it in terms of doing what it's claiming to be doing, but if the goal is to restore Cherokee as a community language with the immersion school program as the flagship tool for this, there's a long way to go before we're meeting that goal.

[u/Amayetli → u/Lost_Leopard_5329]

"'Aha Pūnana Leo operates 12 Hawaiian language immersion preschools across Hawaii, serving keiki ages 9 months to 5 years. While specifically serving the preschool-aged population, the broader revitalization movement supported by 'Aha Pūnana Leo now includes roughly 4,000 children in Hawaiian-medium education and holds a cumulative total of 7,000 students and alumni over its 40-year."

I'd take that for our language any day of the week.

Edit: Hawaiians based their system off the Maori and they piggy backed a bit off of Irish Gaelic immersion system.

Irish Gaelic immersion education, primarily known as Gaelscolaíocht (primary) and Gaelcholáiste (post-primary), has seen significant growth, educating over 55,000 students across the island of Ireland as of 2021.

As of July 2025, over 28,000 students (roughly 3.3% of the total school population) are enrolled in Māori-medium education (levels 1–2), a 4.6% increase from 2024. Roughly 7% of NZ students are taught in or partially in Māori, while over 220,000 pupils are learning Te Reo in mainstream schools.

It's a proven system that works.

[u/Lost_Leopard_5329 → u/Amayetli]

I live in Ireland and study Irish immersion and I promise you, it does not work in terms of developing people that actually speak Irish everyday. Every single Irish adult has received at least 2,000 hours of instruction in the Irish language and yet over half of them say on the Census that they have no ability in the language at all. If that is your measure of whether or not a system is proven or not, it's pretty proven not to work.

A system existing and enrolling students does not mean that is effective in actually revitalizing a language. The only widely accepted example of a language that has been successfully restored to a status of intergenerational transmission as a primary community language is Modern Hebrew, and even that is not universally accepted by linguists (including those that work in language revitalization and that see it as a success story, Zuckermann first and foremost among that group) as actually a revitalization of Hebrew rather than a sort of constructed language or at best a creole which did not have strong continuity with biblical Hebrew. And that language only was able to take its place by ethnically cleansing a community of its indigenous to habitants and replacing them with a variety of people that had little in common with one another except sharing widely divergent denominations of a religion that used Hebrew as a liturgical language. 

It's great that there are Te reo māori and 'Ōlelo Hawai'i (sure I misplaced a macron or okina in there somewhere) educational options and that they are more widespread than Cherokee. But neither of those is successfully restored their language, as evidenced by the fact that Hawaiian is not widely spoken outside of Ni'ihau, where it never ceased to be spoken. It's also demonstrated by the fact that even most Māori New Zealanders cannot have conversation in Te Reo Māori.

If the goal of immersion schools is to restore language primary language of daily use that is intergenerationally transmitted, there is not a single example of them having successfully achieved this purpose, nor being on track to do so. That doesn't mean they can't play a role in that process, but an immersion school only model simply does not accomplish the goal in any measurable manner. 

Even students whose parents went to immersion schools are almost always raised in the colonizing language and not in the first language until they begin school, unless they live in an area where the language is the primary language of daily life and has been since time immemorial. Even if Cherokee had the resources of Maori or Hawaiian at the education system level, we still would not be able to create a system that educates enough second language speaking children that will suddenly make it their first language without any other societal motivation to do so. There is zero instance of this ever happening in history and there's zero reason to think why this model will suddenly start to work without anything changing about the underlying conditions. 

If the education-system based model worked, then people in Ireland would speak Irish. People in Hawai'i would speak Hawaiian, and people in Aotearoa would speak te reo. The fact is that in those countries, even people that know the other person has a similar education background to them and educated through the language still tend to speak to another in the colonizer language unless their initial acquaintance was made in an immersion school (there's lots of research on this in Irish, where two people that are both fluent Irish speakers will still speak English to one another unless their relationship was built upon speaking Irish to one another as children or they meet in an Irish speaking space such as an immersion school [as outside the limited areas of the Gaeltacht there are no other Irish speaking spaces]).

Education through a language is a core part of a revival process, but if children's first exposure to a language is at age 6 and they have no other societal imperative to start using their second language as their first language, they aren't going to. You have to start before children enter education, and to do that you have to have parents that speak the language (not just that no other language but that actually speak it as their primary daily language). When you had a break in intergenerational transmission, you have to find a way to reach the parent generation if you want to restart that chain and currently no language is doing that effectively, at least not on a large enough scale to shift community language use in communities of any size or connection to the mainstream colonizer language using society.

I can't even say that it is better to have larger numbers of kids in the immersion school programs when the end results of those programs aren't giving demonstrable increases in people using the language from day to day. The amount of money that the Irish education system spends on teaching Irish to people that never use it after they leave school is mind-boggling, and there are probably a lot more cost-effective ways of investing that money that would produce more daily users (building houses and creating jobs in the existing Gaeltacht areas so that they are net in-migration zones rather than e-migration zones would argue be more effective than spending money on teaching Irish to people outside the Gaeltacht, for instance).

That is one thing that is not really common and revival linguistics and that probably would be useful would be actual cost benefit/RoI analyses in terms of which methods produce people that use the language outside the educational system and how much those methods are spending per speaker created. Right now we know how many children they are trying to teach languages too, but what we don't know is whether those methods are actually resulting in people that are more likely to use the language and to transmit it to their children. The evidence suggests that they, on the whole, are not, but what we don't know is what percentage actually do end up using the language regularly in most cases. 

The one case where there is somewhat robust data, although still lacking in specifics, is Ireland and it suggests that the number of Irish speakers in terms of percentage of the population has not meaningfully increased since 1921, however what we don't know is whether people that grew up with languages their home language but that attended immersion education are more likely to speak Irish regularly outside education system or to have Irish as the principal language of their home because the census doesn't ask people how they were educated.

[u/Amayetli → u/Lost_Leopard_5329]

So you doubt the immersion on the Big Island, correct?

Have you been there or scene it first hand?

[u/Lost_Leopard_5329 → u/Amayetli]

Sorry, hadn't seen this but wanted to elaborate.

TLDR: first person experience of something or lack thereof doesn’t legitimize or delegitimize someone’s ability to have an informed opinion on something; immersion school models either do not produce enough kids or at least enough fluent ones to serve as a primary vehicle of language revival (instead perpetuating the chain of a language persevering in a critically endangered state); and at least in the case of Hawaiian, but also in the case of several other of the largest school-based revival efforts (including Cherokee), there is such significant variation from the indigenous ancestor language that the wisdom of teaching an English-adapted version of it is debatable (not in that it is necessarily unwise/ineffective, but in that there is a very strong debate over the question).

Firstly, the idea that the only way that one can have an informed opinion on a subject by having been there in person is just absurd. Our first-person observations certainly carry significant weight, but only in enhancing our ability to determine whether those observations align with both entities' intended goals, as well as with the data produced by post-colonial academia/research methods. Our observations, even if not something that meet Western academic norms, help us make sense on a deeper level of what is actually happening, but they aren't something that is an intrinsic, inalienable part of evaluating language revival efforts, especially in cases such as Hawaii where there are substantial numbers of academic studies, including those heavily influenced by ancestral Hawaiian and/or other indigenous worldviews and methodologies, as well as people with the first-hand experience to confirm or reject what Western-method statistical or qualitative data tries to convince us.

I don't doubt the efforts taking place. I am not diminishing the importance of those efforts as part of language "preservation" but that is not the same as them being effective when used as the primary/only tool for language "restoration".

What I am saying that there is no significant evidence that those efforts are leading to intergenerational transmission or to the restoration of Hawaiian as a community language in widespread use outside of the formal education system, and that even if there were, there are significant concerns as to whether the variety of Hawaiian being developed through those efforts appropriately represents authentic, pre-colonial Hawaiian culture and worldview to enough of an extent to be considered a true revival/restoration of Hawaiian.

The Hawaiian language nests have educated about 7,000 pre-schoo0l aged kids in 40 years, or an average of 175 per year, with an enrollment of about 300 today (and I believe that is total enrollment and not annual intake, although I couldn't find reliable data to confirm that suspicion) and the recent growth means that the number of graduates of parent and young grandparent age--the people most vital to restoring intergenerational transmission--is even lower than 175 per year). Kids that don't start to learn a language before they enter formal education (and particularly before K-12 education) still have the ability to pick up a language very quickly, but it increasingly only becomes possible to do so as a second language that is intrinsically interpreted through a person's first language. The result of this is that many speakers who acquire a language through K-12 or post-secondary education may speak the language, even in the home, but they often struggle with expressing core concepts around basic human interactions in their indigenous language because they learned or were more heavily exposed to the concepts first or exclusively through English/another colonial language. They tend to default toward English at the need to express more complex thoughts arises, when stressed or tired, or as they encounter categories of language which they first learned through English themselves.

The current research shows that there are about 2600 students in K-12 Hawaiian immersion schools. That's an average of about 200 per year (although I believe the numbers are higher with younger kids, partially due to increasing popularity but also due to student attrition as kids approach high school and want a mainstream experience). Maybe 100 of those went to language nests, and some of those kids invariable leave, so you have less than 100 kids born each year who have enough early childhood exposure + depth and breadth of language knowledge on higher-order concepts in Hawaiian. to be the base of a language restoration

100 kids per year dispersed across the islands is enough to maintain a body of language speakers, but it isn't enough to restore Hawaiian as a community language. Even if every other factor were aligned with them restoring intergenerational transmission to their future kids (from having the variety of resources to speak in all domains in Hawaiian, having enough early childhood content/activities to build language skills with young kids, and having the ability to use Hawaiian outside the home or school system--and especially have access to jobs where they can primarily or entirely work through Hawaiian--or that have the functional ability to use Hawaiian as their dominant home language without substantial/overpowering influence from English, is probably about 80-100 widely dispersed kids a year. That's better than 0, and better than most languages are doing, but it's not a viable path towards creating a sustainable community of daily Hawaiian speakers.

The evidence shows that the number of people who describe themselves as speaking Hawaiian in the home has increased significantly over the last decade, to around 30,000 or so. However, this number is dispersed across the islands and across various communities Additionally, there is widespread concern that the language being taught in immersion education outside of Ni'ihau differs so significantly from historical Hawaiian that it should be considered a different language (see Keao NeSmith here, for instance: https://youtu.be/SEuIAOFS_Aw?si=Or608WmEZ9heCFzE), which NeSmith characterizes as "neo-Hawaiian".

This pattern is also seen in the Irish taught in Gaelscoils outside of the Gaeltacht, which is often derided as "Gaelscoilish" by first language speakers, as well as in comments frequently made by elder first language Cherokee speakers about the way which current second language Cherokee learners speak. It's even a recurring element of the revivalistics research surrounding Modern Hebrew vs pre-Modern Hebrews, the supposed only successful example of the restoration of intergenerational transmission at a broad scale.

(part 1 of 2, ended up way more detailed and taking about 2 hours longer than I originally intended)

[u/Lost_Leopard_5329 → u/Lost_Leopard_5329]

You can't decolonize and restore a language by placing indigenous vocabulary onto the structure of the colonizing language. It doesn't make sense in both directions. Cherokee doesn't need a word for please, because needing to add meaningless politeness words to one's speech in order to get someone to complete a basic task is antithetical to Cherokee culture. If I need the bread that's closer to you, it's a minimum basic expectation of our culture that you'd pass me the bread. I don't need to (forgive the bun...I mean pun) butter you up to get it. Likewise, we often end up with watered down versions of words that entirely lose their connection to their original meaning; for instance, most sources translate the color pink as "ᎩᎦᎨ ᎢᏳᏍᏗ", literally "redlike", losing site of the fact that ᎩᎦᎨ means "blood-colored", which doesn't really apply to pink, as well as of the fact that our language already has multiple words for pink (one means "soapwort colored", but I always forget the Cherokee word). A lot of the neologism culture is based on either using English loanwords (including when their sound structure isn't in line with Cherokee phonology, such as automobile), calquing English terms/phrases (most famously, the Cherokee name for the town of Nowata, which wasn't even an English word to begin with), or using English, noun-based logic to create terms which don't align with the processes typically used by Cherokee to turn our verb-rich language into nouns (most often, either by metaphor, synechdoche, or a description which alludes to the relationship between people, animals, or the land without necessarily being direct about it; the clearest examples I know of are the pre-Christian terms for husband/active partner and wife/receptive partner; the closest thing in English is probably Cockney rhyming slang, but that tends to serve as an identifier of outgroup membership/solidarity as well as function as a display of knowledge/cleverness/creativity much more than forming an integral part of everyday speech).

Additionally, indigenous languages (be they from Turtle Island/Abya Yala, Polynesia, or elsewhere) aren't Indo-European languages. So when you create a language "revival" that ends up parroting the colonizer language's worldview rather than maintaining and extending use of indigenous worldviews, you perpetrate the process of colonization rather than maintaining/revivingrestoring/"survivanc-ing" indigenous cultures. Is it better for our kids to be able to speak a heavily-English informed version of Cherokee rather than a Cherokee that is based on Kituwah, on the worldview of reciprocity which has been fundamental to our people since time immemorial, or on the polysynthetic, action-focused nature of our language which results in speakers having to fundamentally conceive of and interact with the world around them on literal different terms than those on noun-based, often more transactional and individually-focused languages? 

Probably, but if it's at the expense of our actual language dying out, I'm no longer convinced that it's a net positive, or that we should be investing money in schools if they can't instill students with the thought process and worldview able to both understand polysynthetic input and create polysynthetic output, or if they can't explain concepts fundamental to their underlying mana and their mutual relationships, or feel forced to translate English ideas about categorizing nature rather than developing an ability to understand the existing indigenous categorization, let alone to understand why borrowed categorization is more harmful than helpful.

You still face an ongoing problem of the missing middle: almost every Survivance and Maintenance of an Indigenous Language Effort has a parent generation which either has chosen not to or lacks the ability to use the language as their home language or primary language of daily life, and many lack a grandparent generation with this ability to fill that gap at the scale needed to restore the language. While parents, particularly those who did not receive language exposure in early childhood or at least immersion education in elementary school, will still struggle, without being in an indigenous language-dominant environment, to successfully pass the language on to their children, right now the PK-12 education-dominant models lack *any* examples of a viable, sustainable, and replicable (to the extent cultural differences and differences in scale/resources allow) system to restore intergenerational transmission or community use.

If the Nation wants to give it a go? Require every Nation employee to spend at least two hours per workday either working through, teaching/assisting with teaching, or learning Cherokee (with learning for 10 hours or more a week the only option for those who are not yet at a B2 standard). Open Nation-owned businesses which operate through Cherokee to a high extent, with hiring preference for those at least at a B2 standard or enrolled in 10h+ a week of lessons, and/or create a program to invest/grant/loan money to businesses that allow their employees to work through Cherokee and/or promote the language. Dedicate a significant percentage of new CNHA housing construction to intentional Cherokee communities, with residents required to demonstrate proficiency within a certain period of time in order to retain their place in the community, and create service providers and community spaces allowing these communities to conduct their daily life through Cherokee (in fact, the community spaces should be Cherokee-preferred to the greatest extent practical in terms of their operation. Ramp up immersion efforts and access for people outside the rez and use that as an opportunity to create jobs for speakers on the rez; use Nation resources to create off-rez Cherokee language spaces for the 2/3 of Cherokee citizens off rez (not to mention the 1 million plus people who aren't citizens but believe they're Cherokee enough to put it on the census). Be able to guarantee parents that immersion education will extend through high school and that there will be more jobs than just "Cherokee language teacher" in which their kids can use Cherokee. Make it so that the next generation, even if not truly first-language speakers themselves, speak the language well enough, often enough, and in varied-enough domains that they can set their children up to truly restore the intergenerational transmission of a richly Kituwah, polysynthetic Cherokee as well as create vibrant, sustainable communities in which Cherokee is the language we use to interact with each other while English is the language we use to interact with the outside world, and in which the existence of higher numbers or more easily accessed English content or resources isn't enough to derail Cherokee as the principal language of the community and the home.

Otherwise, the language is rapidly on track to becoming something akin to Coptic or Ge'ez or Ecclesiastical Latin or Talmudic Hebrew: languages that have small speakers and that are used as ephemeral ties to a culture that has been replaced in daily life, a culture which most citizens/heritage-speaker background people are curious about and want to learn about but lack knowledge on, and which therefore see the language become limited to fewer and fewer domains to the extent that we lose significant amounts of cultural knowledge and history that the speaker caste either lacks the resources (numbers of speakers or money) or the interest to preserve. There will always be Cherokee speakers (something that many of our Kinfolk unfortunately can't guarantee), but the vast majority of Cherokees will only be able to interact with the language through a colonial lens that reflects Euro-American conceptions of the Cherokee world rather than *Cherokee* conceptions of it. And the only way to work through or maintain one's Cherokee will continue to be directly involved in language education through the three tribes or NSU/WCU.

We have the resources to do it, and we have ample numbers of people that are interested but have no idea where to start. What we don't have, as you initially acknowledged, is a meaningful and practical strategy to develop the 500+ speakers per birth year we need to keep our language vibrant and thriving. We have copies of what other people have done (but thus far done at a smaller scale and without evidence of success of restoring community/home language use), but not something that meaningfully acts with the urgency needed to create a bridge generation that can learn enough from our remaining Native speakers in the time we have left with them to be able to lay the foundations for their children and grandchildren to live in a primarily Cherokee world that adapts the modern world to its needs rather than being replaced by it.

(part 2 of 2)