Cherokee on a smartphone: Part of a drive to save a language

By itself, being able to read smartphone home screens in Cherokee won’t be enough to safeguard the Indigenous language, endangered after a long history of erasure.

But it might be a step toward immersing younger tribal citizens in the language spoken by a dwindling number of their elders.

Cherokee leaders have spent several months consulting with Lenovo-owned Motorola, which last week introduced a Cherokee language interface on its newest line of phones.

Now phone users will be able to find apps and toggle settings using the syllable-based written form of the language first created by the Cherokee Nation’s Sequoyah in the early 1800s.

“In the future, our goal is to continue to research and deliver on this revitalization project, by including other endangered indigenous languages, as well as work to open source Cherokee language data via motorola.com and share our process of digitization with other globalization professionals,” said Janine Oliveira, Executive Director of Globalization Software at Motorola Mobility, in a news release. “We hope this milestone will inspire more actions towards revitalization within our industry, seeing more digitally inclusive technology.”

You can read more here, or here.