Abstract: Tone in Cherokee nouns is described in this paper as a hybrid system of metrical pitch accent and lexical tone.Four speakers of Oklahoma Cherokee spoke nouns in a frame dialog that put each of thirty-seven nouns in citation form, in a declarative sentence, a question, and with contrastive focus.In addition to an optional L*H pitch accent that may occur on the penultimate or antepenultimate syllable only, and three distinctive tones (L fall, H, and H fall) that are restricted to occur only on non final, unaccented syllables, the study also identifies some aspects of Cherokee intonation contours. Introduction.This paper has two aims.First, the paper presents acoustic phonetic pitch traces of Cherokee nouns spoken in citation forms, and in three types of sentential context.These phonetic data supplement a literature on Cherokee tone that contains very limited phonetic data and even more limited data on Cherokee intonation (Lindsey, 1985;Wright, 1996).Second, the paper presents an analysis of the surface phonology of Cherokee tone.This analysis is inspired by, and largely compatible with previous phonological analyses of Cherokee tone (Lindsey & Scancarelli, 1985;