'Cherokee' is Creek for 'people with another language'. (It's really amazing how white settlers always managed to learn some other tribe's name for any group of Indians. They learned the Creek word for Cherokee, but not the Creek word for themselves.) Anyway, our original name for ourselves was Aniyunwiya, but Cherokee is fine too (though we say it Tsalagi--there's no R in our language). There are about 350,000 Cherokee people today, primarily in Oklahoma, North Carolina, and Missouri.

Native Languages of the Americas: Cherokee (Tsalagi)
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