Which Native American scholar created the Cherokee syllabary?

The Native American scholar Sequoyah created the Cherokee syllabary.

Sequoyah, also known as George Gist or George Guess in some historical sources, developed a writing system for the Cherokee language in the early 19th century. Around 1809, he began experimenting with ways to represent Cherokee speech on paper after observing how European Americans used writing to communicate across distances.

He first considered symbols representing whole words, then developed a syllabary in which each character represents a Cherokee syllable. The final system contains 85 characters. Some symbols resemble Latin letters, but their sounds are different; the visual resemblance largely resulted from Sequoyah adapting available forms rather than copying the Roman alphabet’s values.

The Cherokee Nation officially adopted the syllabary in 1825. It rapidly supported literacy, translation, government documents, and journalism. The Cherokee Phoenix, founded in 1828, became the first newspaper published by a Native American nation and printed material in both Cherokee and English. Sequoyah therefore created a syllabary, not an alphabet in the strict linguistic sense.