Amharic

Not to be confused with Arabic or Aramaic.
Amharic
አማርኛ (Amarəñña)
Amharic script, fidäl, from Ge'ez script
PronunciationIPA: [amarɨɲːa] ⓘ
Native toEthiopia
Ethnicity31 million Amhara (2020)[1]
SpeakersL1: 35 million (2020)[1]
L2: 25 million (2019)[1] Total: 60 million (2019–2020)[1]
Geʽez script (Amharic syllabary)
Ge'ez Braille
Signed Amharic[2]
Official status
Official language in
 Ethiopia[3]
Regulated byImperial Academy (former)
Language codes
ISO 639-1am
ISO 639-2amh
ISO 639-3amh
Glottologamha1245
Linguasphere12-ACB-a
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Amharic (/æmˈhærɪk/ am-HARR-ik[4][5][6] or /ɑːmˈhɑːrɪk/ ahm-HAR-ik;[7] native name: አማርኛ, romanized: Amarəñña, IPA: [amarɨɲːa] ⓘ) is an Ethiopian Semitic language, which is a subgrouping within the Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic languages. 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 in Ethiopia.[8]

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.[9] As of 2020, it has over 33,700,000 mother-tongue speakers and more than 25,100,000 second language speakers in 2019, making the total number of speakers over 58,800,000.[1][10] Amharic is the largest, most widely spoken language in Ethiopia, and the first most spoken mother-tongue in Ethiopia. Amharic is also the second most widely spoken Semitic language in the world (after Arabic).[11][12]

Amharic is written left-to-right using a system that grew out of the Geʽez script.[13] The segmental writing system in which consonant-vowel sequences are written as units is called an abugida (አቡጊዳ).[14] The graphemes are called fidäl (ፊደል), which means "script", "alphabet", "letter", or "character".

There is no universally agreed-upon Romanization of Amharic into Latin script. The Amharic examples in the sections below use one system that is common among linguists specializing in Ethiopian Semitic languages.

  1. ^ a b c d e Amharic at Ethnologue (27th ed., 2024) Closed access icon
  2. ^ Morgan, Mike (9 April 2010). "Complexities of Ethiopian Sign Language Contact Phenomena & Implications for AAU". L'Alliance française et le Centre Français des Études Éthiopiennes. Retrieved 3 June 2017.
  3. ^ Shaban, Abdurahman. "One to five: Ethiopia gets four new federal working languages". Africa News. Archived from the original on 15 December 2020. Retrieved 22 January 2021.
  4. ^ Laurie Bauer, 2007, The Linguistics Student's Handbook, Edinburgh; Collins English Dictionary (2003), Random House Kernerman Webster's College Dictionary (2010)
  5. ^ "Amharic". Oxford English Dictionary (Online ed.). Oxford University Press. (Subscription or participating institution membership required.)
  6. ^ "Amharic". Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary. Merriam-Webster.
  7. ^ "Amharic". dictionary.com. Retrieved 10 August 2013.
  8. ^ Meyer, Ronny (2011). "The Role of Amharic as a National Language and an African lingua franca". In Stefan Weninger (ed.). The Semitic Languages. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. pp. 1212–1220.
  9. ^ Gebremichael, M. (2011). Federalism and conflict management in Ethiopia: case study of Benishangul-Gumuz Regional State (PhD). United Kingdom: University of Bradford. hdl:10454/5388.
  10. ^ Shaik Johny Basha; Duggineni Veeraiah; Boddu Venkat Charan; Wiltrud Sahithi Yeddu; Devalla Ganesh Babu (2023). "Detection and Comparative Analysis of Handwritten Words of Amharic Language to English using CNN-Based Frameworks". 2023 International Conference on Inventive Computation Technologies (ICICT). pp. 422–427. doi:10.1109/ICICT57646.2023.10134103. ISBN 979-8-3503-9849-6. S2CID 259028086.
  11. ^ Amharic at Ethnologue (25th ed., 2022) Closed access icon
  12. ^ "The world factbook". cia.gov. 2 March 2022.
  13. ^ Adugna, Gabe. "Research: Language Learning – Amharic: Home". library.bu.edu. Retrieved 8 December 2021.
  14. ^ "Amharic alphabet, pronunciation and language". www.omniglot.com. Retrieved 26 July 2017.