The Eastern dialect, formerly often called the Lower Cherokee dialect,
was originally spoken in all the towns upon the waters of the Keowee
and Tugaloo, head-streams of Savannah river, in South Carolina and
the adjacent portion of Georgia. Its chief peculiarity is a rolling
r, which takes the place of the l of the other dialects. In this
dialect the tribal name is Tsa'ragi', which the English settlers
of Carolina corrupted to Cherokee, while the Spaniards, advancing
from the south, became better familiar with the other form, which
they wrote as Chalaque. Owing to their exposed frontier position,
adjoining the white settlements of Carolina, the Cherokee of this
division were the first to feel the shock of war in the campaigns of
1760 and 1776, with the result that before the close of the Revolution
they had been completely extirpated from their original territory and
scattered as refugees among the more western towns of the tribe. The
consequence was that they lost their distinctive dialect, which is
now practically extinct. In 1888 it was spoken by but one man on the
reservation in North Carolina.
The Middle dialect, which might properly be designated the Kituhwa
dialect, was originally spoken in the towns on the Tuckasegee and the
headwaters of the Little Tennessee, in the very heart of the Cherokee
country, and is still spoken by the great majority of those now living
on the Qualla reservation. In some of its phonetic forms it agrees with
the Eastern dialect, but resembles the Western in having the l sound.
The Western dialect was spoken in most of the towns of east Tennessee
and upper Georgia and upon Hiwassee and Cheowa rivers in North
Carolina. It is the softest and most musical of all the dialects of
this musical language, having a frequent liquid l and eliding many
of the harsher consonants found in the other forms. It is also the
literary dialect, and is spoken by most of those now constituting
the Cherokee Nation in the West.
Scattered among the other Cherokee are individuals whose pronunciation
and occasional peculiar terms for familiar objects give indication of a
fourth and perhaps a fifth dialect, which can not now be localized. It
is possible that these differences may come from foreign admixture,
as of Natchez, Taskigi, or Shawano blood. There is some reason
for believing that the people living on Nantahala river differed
dialectically from their neighbors on either side (3).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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