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
This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA.

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 second most spoken mother-tongue in Ethiopia (after Oromo). 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.