Most of the Ethiopian Jewish communities in Ethiopia and Israel speak Amharic. Additionally, 3 million emigrants outside of Ethiopia speak the language. More recent sources state the number of first-language speakers in 2018 as nearly 32 million, with another 25 million second-language speakers in Ethiopia. The 2007 census reported that Amharic was spoken by 21.6 million native speakers in Ethiopia. Until 2020 Amharic was the sole official language of Ethiopia. There are 33 basic characters, each of which has seven forms depending on which vowel is to be pronounced in the syllable. Amharic is an Afro-Asiatic language of the Southwest Semitic group and is related to Geʽez, or Ethiopic, the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox church Amharic is written in a slightly modified form of the alphabet used for writing the Geʽez language. It is one of the official languages of Ethiopia, together with Oromo, Somali, Afar, and Tigrinya. While the appellation of "language of the king" ( Ge'ez: ልሳነ ንጉሥ "Lisane Negus")/( Amharic: የንጉሥ ቋንቋ "Ye-Negus QwanQwa") and its use in the royal court are otherwise traced to the Amhara Emperor Yekuno Amlak. The Amhara nobles supported the Zagwe prince Lalibela in his power struggle against his brothers which led him to make Amharic Lessana Negus as well as fill the Amhara nobles in the top positions of his Kingdom. The Amharic examples in the sections below use one system that is common among linguists specialising in Ethiopian Semitic languages.Īmharic has been the official working language of Ethiopia, language of the courts, the language of trade and everyday communications and of the military since the late 12th century. There is no universally agreed-upon Romanization of Amharic into Latin script. The graphemes are called fidäl ( ፊደል), which means "script", "alphabet", "letter", or "character". The segmental writing system in which consonant-vowel sequences are written as units is called an abugida ( አቡጊዳ). Īmharic is written left-to-right using a system that grew out of the Geʽez script.
Amharic is also the second largest Semitic language in the world (after Arabic). Amharic is the most widely spoken language in Ethiopia, and the second most spoken mother-tongue in Ethiopia (after Oromo). It has over 32,400,000 mother-tongue speakers and more than 25,100,000 second language speakers making the total number of speakers over 57,500,000.
The language serves as the official working language of the Ethiopian federal government, and is also the official or working language of several of Ethiopia's federal regions. It is spoken as a first language by the Amharas, and also serves as a lingua franca for all other populations residing in major cities and towns of Ethiopia. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA.Īmharic ( / æ m ˈ h ær ɪ k/ or / ɑː m ˈ h ɑːr ɪ k/ (Amharic: አማርኛ), Amarəñña, IPA: ( listen)) is an Ethiopian Semitic language, which is a subgrouping within the Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic languages. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. This article contains IPA phonetic symbols.
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