This seems fine to me.

Not sure I care for that “17 other tribal dialects” line.

Yeah, “Native-American dialects” would have been a better choice.

And I’m not sure why, other than ignorance, why the reporter dwelt on the keyboard. Cherokee characters are supported by Unicode, so designing a virtual keyboard or keyboard map should be a trivial task. I would presume there are models for Cherokee keyboards going back to the days of typewriters, so even the layout should have been done already.

Quite. The keyboardisation of Cherokee must have been a simpler task than that, say, of Mandarin.

I’d have gone for Native-American languages, but then I think water is wet.

I would guess that they chose “dialects” because multiple dialects of e.g. Navajo were used in the program, and the number 17 reflects counting of each of these dialects separately, rather than as a single language.

And possibly “tribal” rather than “Native American” because the code-talker program also used Basque speakers.

Thank you, Dr. T.  I’ll buy that.

BTW, would this thread not have a place on the General Discussion board?

So moved.

I think google should be saluted for this but is it true all Cherokee-speakers also speak and read English? It’s clearly a cultural identity thing which is admirable. No one in Wales or Ireland or Scotland cannot speak English nowadaysl. Is it the same with Native American languages in America and Canada?
I remember in the film Thunderheart Val KIlmer is conned out of a pair of Raybans by an elder who it turns out could speak English all along. I doubt if anyone in Wales, etc., could get away with this unless they looked over 80 and the scammees were foreign, but who knows?

Ethnologue says there are 130 monolingual Cherokee speakers out of over 16,000 that speak the language. Over 300,000 are ethnically Cherokee.

That is a fascinating resource. 32,700 Welsh monolinguals astonished me. No figures for Scots or Irish Gaelic, though. Irish must be way higher than Welsh. There are Welsh speakers in the geographical area Patagonia who I hope speak Spanish if only for reasons of assimilation. And Japanese speakers in Peru though corrupt Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori, who was granted asylum in Japan, apparently spoke lousy Japanese.

No one could reach their language in gmail without being able to read English to get there unless they had Windows in that language.

The Irish figures aren’t that much higher. The 2011 Irish census has some 66,000 Irish speakers in the Gaeltacht areas, roughly two thirds of the population in those regions. This is not the same as monolingual, however, as undoubtedly some of these Irish speakers also speak English as a second language. The census also says a little over half of those in the Gaeltacht age 3–4 speak Irish; that tells you something about how well it’s surviving as a native tongue. (The difference between 66% for all ages and 50% for children could be accounted for by either a decline in those speaking it as a native tongue or by people moving to the areas and learning the language.) The Gaeltacht are the regions of Ireland where Irish remains the predominant language.

IIRC, the number of native speakers at the beginning of the twentieth century was only around 40,000, so the population of native speakers hasn’t risen all that much. The number of speakers of Irish as a second language, however, has increased dramatically.

For the Irish census figures see: http://www.cso.ie/px/pxeirestat/Statire/SelectVarVal/Define.asp?maintable=CDD34&PLanguage=0

Thanks, Dave. There’s a funny satire on Irish and the Gaeltacht though a lot must have been lost in translation. Google wikipedia “An Beal Bocht”, the link won’t work.