Amharic · አማርኛ

About Amharic

Language family

Afroasiatic, Semitic (Ethiopian Semitic branch)

Where it's spoken

Ethiopia

Speakers

roughly 57 million speakers including second-language use

Amharic has been Ethiopia's dominant administrative language for centuries and descends, alongside Tigrinya, from Ge'ez, which itself survives today as the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church much as Latin survives in Catholic liturgy. It is written in the Ge'ez abugida, a script where each character represents a consonant-vowel syllable rather than a single sound. Ethiopia's history as one of the only African nations never fully colonized helped Amharic and its script remain a strong, continuously used national tradition.