አማርኛ – Amharic – Amarinya – амхарский – Amharique – Amhariski – ਅਮਹਾਰਿਕ – Amharică – isi-amharic – èdè Amẹrika – الأمهرية

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Amharic language is one of the two main languages in Ethiopia – along with Oromo language. 


Like Arabic, Hebrew and Assyrian, Amharic is a semitic language, belonging to the Afro-Asiatic family. There are three main subgroups of this family in Ethiopia:


  1. the Ethiopic subgroup, including Amharic and Tigrinya;
  2. Cushitic subgroup, including Somali and Oromo languages;
  3. and Omotic, including the Wolayitta language.

In Ethiopia’s south-west you will also come across Nilo-Saharan languages, including Nuer and Mursi languages.


For many Ethiopians Amharic remains a second language.


Amharic is a Second Language For Many Ethiopians

The name Amharic (ኣማርኛ – a.ma.r.gna) comes from the district of Amhara (አማራ) in northern Ethiopia, which is thought to be the historic centre of the language.
Due to the language policy which was settled during the Derg regime (1974-1987), Amharic was widely spoken by a majority of the population as a mother tongue, mostly by the Amharas, or as a second or bridge language.
Amharic has lost its status of being the single official language of Ethiopia since the 1994 Constitution. The article 5-2 of the Constitution states that “All Ethiopian languages shall enjoy equal state recognition.” However article 5-2 grants Amharic the status of the federal government as a language of work, “Amharic shall be the working language of the Federal Government”.

 

Amharic Language Historical Origins

 Ethiopia’s  ancient culture is reflected in the history of its languages. Around the first millenium BC, the people of northern Ethiopia and present-day Erithrea began to establish solid contacts with the people of south west-Arabia, just over the Red Sea. New languages began to emerge from this interaction, including Ge’ez. 
Ge’ez language also spelled Geez, is the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. This language is used in church chants, and sacred manuscripts to this day.  The current  Ethiopic alpahbet, also known as fidel – ፊደል, used to write Amharic and Tigrinya, is adapted from Ge’ez.

Ge’ez was the language used in the Aksum Empire, also known as the Kingdom of Axum or Aksumite Empire, which dominated Ethiopia from 1st to 9th centuries AD. As the empire went into decline, the power base shifted to the Amhara region.  From the 11th to the 13th centuries, under the Zagwe dynasty (named after the Agaw people who ruled during this time), the use of Amharic became more widespread.


Over the following centuries, ruling regimes tended to be Amhara-led. This combined with the region’s mountainous environment and geographic isolation, ensured the spread and development of the language. Ethiopia escaped long periods of European colonial domination, except the Italian occupation from 1936 to 1941. Thus, a wide part of the grammar and vocabulary were able to stay unhindered. 

The written language was initially the domain of the church and the elite. Modernisation in the 19th and 20th century, mainly with the introduction of printers, encouraged its use among Ethiopians from all backgrounds. 

Amharic Writing System

Amharic is written left-to-right using a system that grew out of the Ge’ez script. The writing system is called Fidäl – ፊደል.

Fidel is used in Erythrea as well for the Tigre language. If you are learning tigrinya, you can apply the alphabet learning method presented in this blog.

There’s no standard way of transcribing amharic into roman alphabet. The symbols used vary considerably according to the authors and linguists.

There is, however, a scientific transcription of Amharic that makes it possible to make it unambiguous. It requires special characters, which are often not available on computer systems. It is rarely used outside of linguistics books as it is not easily understood by non-specialists.

Each character represents a consonant + vowel combination. So we identify 33 consonants sounds (which are in the rows)  and 7 vowels (in the columns). Note that there are repetitive sounds (H :ሀ/ሐ/ኅ/ኸ , A: አ/ዐ, S: ሠ/ሰ, TS:ጸ/ፀ), if we exclude these sounds, there are 28 different sounds + 7 vowels. It  looks difficult to memorize all 231 characters, but once you grasp the basic form of a fidel form from the first column, you will notice the patterns for each vowel sound. Once you get the logic of these patterns, the learning process is very simple. In an upcoming article I will present a simplified learning chart and I will show a simple way of understanding the fidel.

Who uses Amharic?

  • Native speakers in Ethiopia, about 21. 6 million people speaks Amharic according to the last census from the Central Statistical Agency
  • Second language speakers in Ethiopia
  • Second language speakers all over the world
  • Ethiopian jewsih communities in Ethiopia and Israel
  • The Rastafari, Amahric is considered as a holy language by the religion and its followers
  • The D.C. Office of human Rights. In Washington DC, Amharic became one of the six non-English languages in the Language Access Act of 2004, which allows government services and education in Amharic.
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