Cherokee language at risk, but Western Carolina University leads efforts to preserve it

By Staff Cherokee 411

CULLOWHEE, N.C. — Tom Belt doesn’t see the world quite like everyone else.Yes, it is the same blue planet floating in space, full of people with different experiences, beliefs and traditions. But Belt, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, sees it through a Cherokee lens. That lens, however, is fading.

The Cherokee language, spoken for more than 13,000 years, is now endangered. Only about 140 fluent speakers remain in the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, along with others in the Cherokee Nation and the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians.

“If we lose the language, if no one understands the language, if no one speaks it, then the way in which we live in the world will also disappear,” Belt said. “That doesn't mean we're going to lose a way of looking at the world, we’ll now just look at the world the way everybody else does.”

Belt, who has spent decades advocating for language revitalization, said culture and worldview are inseparable from the words used to describe them. “The importance of sustaining our culture as a real culture is heavily dependent on how we interpret the world,” he said. “We lose that, and then there’s no differentiation between us and somebody else except for history.”

At Western Carolina University, faculty, students and members of the Eastern Band are working to change that trajectory. The university’s Cherokee Language Program, led by Director Sara Snyder Hopkins, is part of a growing network of preservation efforts reaching from classrooms to community spaces.

Some instruction happens in traditional settings, but others take place in creative environments such as a screen printing shop or choir risers, wherever the language can live, breathe and be shared.

Hopkins said preserving Cherokee is not just an academic pursuit but a moral one. “Preserving unique ways of seeing the world is, I think, an inherently good thing that doesn't need to be justified in some kind of scientific or monetary way,” she said. “As human beings, that has inherent value, and we should do all that we can to give people the freedom, skills and space to preserve it, and when possible, the resources.”

The work at Western Carolina reflects a broader movement across Indian Country to reclaim Indigenous languages as living expressions of identity, community and faith. For Belt, each word spoken is more than communication; it is a way of keeping a worldview alive.

Source: “Cherokee Language: Keeping the Words Alive,” Western Carolina University. Read the full story at wcu.edu/stories/posts/cherokeelanguage.aspx.