How To Talk Trash In Cherokee

by Don Grooms and John Oocumma is at barely over 100 pages a basic down to earth introduction to speaking Cherokee in everyday situations. Superficially it seems to be a typical phrasebook as you might find for any language.

Except that Cherokee isn't any language. Linguists would have to say it's in decline, mostly spoken by the older generation. Numerically the Cherokee would appear to be doing well, compared with other indigenous peoples, especially if you include all those who say they're part Cherokee. But they live entirely within the USA, they're extensively mixed with the general population, and few are inclined to hold on to their ancestral language. They exist as distinct communities in only two places: on the Qualla Boundary, the Cherokee reservation in the Smoky Mountains at the Western end of North Carolina; and around a couple of towns in the Eastern part of Oklahoma. 

The plain fact is that any Cherokee you met would be a fluent speaker of US English. A Cherokee who spoke English might indulge you with a few words and maybe some of the phrases you picked up from this book (or any other of a surprising number of available books about the language), but you'd never settle into the natural spoken banter which is what the 'trash' of the title refers to. Because 'trash' isn't just about communication, it's about living the culture.

Here's another consideration. The Cherokee of this book may not be the one you want. My exploration of the topic so far doesn't tell me whether it matters, but there are differences between the Cherokee of Oklahoma and the Cherokee of the Qualla Boundary. These differences are the result of the split which occurred two centuries ago when most of the Cherokee were driven West on the 'Trail of Tears' (deliberately during winter; it was an act of genocide) into 'Indian Territory', later Oklahoma, while a few stayed behind, hidden away in the recesses of the Smokies, and, long story too involved to tell here, but in a rare success for Native Americans were eventually allowed to remain, establishing the only native reservation of any size East of the Mississippi.

Almost all the books you may find about the Cherokee language are about the Cherokee of Oklahoma. How To Talk Trash In Cherokee is unusual in being about the Cherokee of the Qualla Boundary.

And I have another problem in using this book. I'm not American. The thing is, just like all those little Lonely Planet etc. phrase books which tourists used to get before we had language apps on smart phones, this book invents its own phonetic system to render the Cherokee words and phrases. That's a problem for me as a British English speaker because I'm almost certainly not pronouncing what I read in the way intended. US phonemes and accents vary enough from British ones to make my utterances probably nonsense to a Cherokee.

This page gives you a fair flavour of the book. Naturally you first notice the illustration. There are a lot of these comic drawings in the book; they keep it light, but also noticeably show Cherokees living ordinary modern albeit rather downbeat lives in North Carolina. They do love sport, they play it rough, and yes, here it's baseball. So this is a page of some stuff a spectator or player might call out. But reading the phonetic Cherokee here is of limited help unless you can hear some of it spoken by an actual Cherokee as a reference model. It bothered me at first, until I realised that this book doesn't pretend to turn you into a Cherokee speaker all by itself. But it's cleverer than you think. Without ever telling you that you're learning some grammar, there actually is a degree of progression taking place as you read it through. There's a small example on this page, where we're given the two phrases, You missed it and You missed it again. If nothing else, we learn that the verb goes at the end. Usually.

I'm pretty weak as a language learner, especially when it comes to the spoken variety, which is what How To Talk Trash is all about. Like most people(?) I first look for words which correspond to words in my own language. Since Cherokee is about as related to English as Klingon, the only vaguely familiar words are going to be borrowed. They're not pointed out to us, but I did spot one or two, like their word for money. I've got some money is rendered as ah-dale-dah-gill, and I've got ten bucks as shko-dale-uh ah-gee-LAH. We find out later that the shko bit means ten. Tell me if I'm wrong, but surely the dale element means money, ie. from our word dollar.

Progression from there involves a good ear and spotting patterns. But one can only go so far with this book, because the English in this book is always given a natural conversational feel, and therefore rarely translates the Cherokee word-for-word. So while certain elements become very familiar to us, like dooley meaning want, we clearly lack information a lot of the time. We're told early on that noo-gah-ee-yuh means when. Mostly(!). Here are some phrases to do with snow.

• When does it snow = noo-gah ee-yuh goo-tee-shkoh
• Snow = oon-zah
• When's it gonna snow = noo-gah-ee-you dah goo tahn
• It's snowing = goo-tee-AH

So, can you tell me which bit means snow? Purely guessing, as a verb the root is goot-, but as a noun, well, see the second phrase. See what I mean about wanting more information, to grasp what's going on there?

I admit some frustration with the inconsistent nature of the phonetic transliteration. But it has to be this way because that's reality: if you saw similar transcriptions of English expressions you would find, maybe to your amazement, that we don't say things exactly the same way all the time. The words might look the same in written form, but the specific sounds we utter may change according to mood, context, or simply the differences of the other words which surround them.

This (above) is only half way through the book but I feel this spread gives a good idea of what the authors are doing. Without any heavy lecturing, we're given a sense of the Cherokee mindset. They're not presented as perfect - there are a lot of entertaining pages related to the potential enthusiasm of Cherokee men for getting into fights - but we are gently encouraged not to make assumptions and shown that there's much to respect.

As for the language, despite the difficulties mentioned above, the book is much more informative than you'd think it had any right to be, and as the sections go by the language does begin to form some shape in your mind. Even mine. Look, it's always going to be hard for any Westerner, because - I think this is the right term, or something like it - Cherokee is an agglutinative language, which means any given word can be a sentence in itself, containing indications of person, action, intention, time and much more. If one is serious, one moves on, to businesslike language books, or online teaching. Personally it'd have been nice to hear the phrases spoken, on a cd perhaps though that would have raised the price. Today they might have provided an internet link to sound samples we could hear. But for an American, perhaps the phonetic system the book uses is as clear as day.

But be realistic about your ambitions, as a Cherokee would about any hard task. There's a joke on the last page: How do you say 'watermelon' in Cherokee? You follow the expressway till you see a sign that says 'Cherokee'. Drive into the middle of town, stand in front of the Information Center and say 'Watermelon'.

I definitely recommend reading the book as a book ie. from beginning to end, rather than dipping in to the various themed sections randomly. Cherokee grammar is a world away from that of any Indo-European language like English, but in a quietly subtle way How To Talk Trash has made me a bit better prepared for what I'll face in some more serious language books I have.

I know perfectly well that no one if they read this at all is going to go off and search for this book, but it did grow on me as I read it, and with its humble almost homemade nature I feel like giving full credits, beyond just title and authors: it was published 🄫1989 by the Downhome Publishing Company of Gainesville, Florida and Cherokee, North Carolina, where I bought it in the museum bookshop.