Amharic is an Ethio-Semitic language, which is a subgrouping within the Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic languages. It is spoken as a first language by the Habesha Amhara people, and also serves as a lingua franca for all other metropolitan populations in Ethiopia.
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. In 2020 in Ethiopia, it had over 33.7 million mother-tongue speakers of which 31 million are ethnically Amhara, and more than 25.1 million second language speakers in 2019, making the total number of speakers over 58.8 million. Amharic is the largest, most widely spoken language in Ethiopia, and the most spoken mother-tongue in Ethiopia. Amharic is also the second most widely spoken Semitic language in the world (after Arabic).
Amharic is written left-to-right using an extended Geʽez script, known as Ethiopic script or (), meaning . The segmental writing system in which consonant-vowel sequences are written as units is called an abugida ().
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.
Dialects Not much has been published about Amharic dialect differences. All dialects are mutually intelligible, but certain minor variations are noted.
Jewish Amharic The Beta Israel speak a dialect of Amharic called Jewish Amharic () or Judeo-Amharic. It replaced many Christian phrases with Jewish ones. One example is the replacing the phrase "It is good that Mary had pardoned you" with "It is good that God has relieved you peacefully"; these phrases are used to congratulate a mother on successful childbirth. Another example is calling a type of grasshopper "Moses's horses" instead of "Mary's horses". This variety also contains influence from Modern Hebrew due to the large Beta Israel presence in Israel. Currently Jewish Amharic is declining as the Beta Israel gradually abandon Amharic in favor of Hebrew. Most of the Ethiopian Jewish communities in Ethiopia and Israel speak Amharic.
History Amharic 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. The Amhara nobles supported the Zagwe prince Lalibela in his power struggle against his brothers which led him to make Amharic Lisane Negus (tongue of the king) as well as fill the Amhara nobles in the top positions of his kingdom.Mohammad Hassan, The Oromo of Ethiopia, pp.3 The appellation of (, ; , ) and its use in the royal court are otherwise traced to the Amhara Emperor Yekuno Amlak.The Southern Marches of Imperial Ethiopia: Essays in History and Social Anthropology, Donham Donald Donham, Lecturer in Social Anthropology Wendy James, Dr, PhD, Former Senior Lecturer in Mathematics Christopher Clapham, Patrick Manning CUP Archive, Sep 4, 1986, p. 11, https://books.google.com/books?id=dvk8AAAAIAAJ&q=Lisane+amharicLayers of Time: A History of Ethiopia, Paul B. Henze, November 18th 2008, p. 78, https://books.google.com/books?id=3VYBDgAAQBAJ&q=Lisane Until 2020 Amharic was the sole official language of Ethiopia. Linguistic development theory
Early Afro-Asiatic populations speaking proto-Semitic, proto-Cushitic and proto-Omotic languages would have diverged by the fourth or fifth millennium BC. Shortly afterwards, the proto-Cushitic and proto-Omotic groups would have settled in the Ethiopian highlands, with the proto-Semitic speakers crossing the Sinai Peninsula into Asia. A later return movement of peoples from South Arabia would have introduced the Semitic languages to Ethiopia. Based on archaeological evidence, the presence of Semitic speakers in the territory date to some time before 500 BC. Linguistic analysis suggests the presence of Semitic languages in Ethiopia as early as 2000 BC. Levine indicates that by the end of that millennium, the core inhabitants of Greater Ethiopia would have consisted of dark-skinned agropastoralists speaking Afro-Asiatic languages of the Semitic, Cushitic and Omotic branches.
Other scholars such as Messay Kebede and Daniel E. Alemu argue that migration across the Red Sea was defined by reciprocal exchange, if it even occurred at all, and that Ethio-Semitic-speaking ethnic groups should not be characterized as foreign invaders.
Amharic is a South Ethio-Semitic language, along with Gurage, Argobba, Harari, and others. While Tigrinya is 68% similar to Geʽez, the lexical similarity of Amharic to the ancient language is lower at 62%. Due to the social stratification of the time, the Cushitic Agaw adopted the South Ethio-Semitic language and eventually absorbed the Semitic population. Amharic thus developed a larger Cushitic substratum than the more northwardly languages where it also exists such as the Modern South Arabian family, along with the Semitic superstratum. The northernmost South Ethio-Semitic speakers, or the proto-Amhara, remained in constant contact with their North Ethio-Semitic neighbors, evidenced by linguistic analysis and oral traditions. A 7th century southward shift of the center of gravity of the Kingdom of Aksum and the ensuing integration and Christianization of the proto-Amhara also resulted in a high prevalence of Geʽez sourced lexicon in Amharic. Some time after the 9th century AD, Amharic diverged from its closest relative, Argobba, probably due to religious differences as the Argobba adopted Islam.
Amharic is not a descendant of Ge'ez as Ge'ez is part of the North Ethio-Semitic branch while Amharic is a South Ethio-Semitic language.
In 1983, Lionel Bender proposed that Amharic may have been constructed as a pidgin as early as the 4th century AD to enable communication between Aksumite soldiers speaking Semitic, Cushitic, and Omotic languages, but this hypothesis has not garnered widespread acceptance. The preservation in Old Amharic of VSO word order and gutturals typical of Semitic languages, Cushitic influences shared with other Ethio-Semitic languages (especially those of the Southern branch), and the number of geographically distinct Cushitic languages that have influenced Amharic at different points in time support a natural evolution of Amharic from a Proto-Ethio-Semitic language with considerable Cushitic influences (similar to Gurage, Tigrinya, etc.).
Based off Amharic terms loaned into nearby languages, and the distinction between /ʔ/, /a/, /x/, /h/, and /ħ/ in the earliest known written form of the language, pre-17th century Amharic exhibited all the phonemes typical of Semitic languages. Along with that, pre-Gondarine period Amharic was not a rigidly SOV word order language as it is today and a VSO order like that of Geʽez and Classical Arabic was common. During the end of the medieval period a transition from the more Semtic-featured earlier version of the language, along with other sound shifts, to the more innovative modern Amharic took place.The Origin of Amharic - Girma A. Demeke, Red Sea Press, 2014
Phonology + ConsonantsLabialAlveolarPalatalVelarLabio-VelarGlottalNasalPlosive/AffricatevoicelessvoicedejectiveFricativevoicelessvoicedejectiveApproximant()Rhotic () The Amharic ejective consonants correspond to the Proto-Semitic "emphatic consonants." In the Ethiopianist tradition they are often transcribed with a dot below the letter.
+VowelsFrontCentralBackHigh Mid Low The notation of central vowels in the Ethiopianist tradition is shown in angled brackets.
Allophones The voiced bilabial plosive /b/ is phonetically realized as a voiced labial approximant [β̞] medially between sonorants in non-geminated form. The fricative ejective // is heard as a fricative ejective [], but is mostly heard as the affricate sound []. The rhotic consonant is realized as a trill when geminated and a tap otherwise. The closed central unrounded vowel /ɨ/ and mid-central vowel /ə/ are generally fronted to [ɪ] and [ɛ], respectively, following palatal consonants, and generally retracted and rounded to [ʊ] and [ɔ], respectively, following labialized velar consonants.
Examples
Geʽez Romanized IPA Gloss drum Ethiopian birr this whose in man
Stress There is no consensus on stress in Amharic, but initial and heavy or closed syllables tend to attract stress.
Writing system
The Amharic script is an abugida, and the graphemes of the Amharic writing system are called . It is derived from a modification of the Geʽez script. Each character represents a consonant+vowel sequence, but the basic shape of each character is determined by the consonant, which is modified for the vowel. Some consonant phonemes are written by more than one series of characters: , , , and (the last one has four distinct letter forms). This is because these originally represented distinct sounds, but phonological changes merged them. The citation form for each series is the consonant+ä form, i.e. the first column of the . There are 34 basic characters, each of which has seven forms depending on which vowel is to be pronounced in the syllable. There are also 49 "wa" letters, which form compound sounds involving "w." All together, the alphabet has some 280 letters. The Amharic script is included in Unicode, and glyphs are included in fonts available with major operating systems.
Alphasyllabary +Chart of Amharic s ʼ ʽ
Gemination
As in most other Ethiopian Semitic languages, gemination is contrastive in Amharic. That is, consonant length can distinguish words from one another; for example, 'he said', 'there is'; 'he hits', 'he will be hit'. Gemination is not indicated in Amharic orthography, but Amharic readers typically do not find this to be a problem. This property of the writing system is analogous to the vowels of Arabic and Hebrew or the tones of many Bantu languages, which are not normally indicated in writing. Ethiopian novelist Haddis Alemayehu, who was an advocate of Amharic orthography reform, indicated gemination in his novel Love to the Grave by placing a dot above the characters whose consonants were geminated, but this practice is rare.
Punctuation
Punctuation includes the following: section mark word separator full stop (period) comma semicolon colon preface colon (introduces speech from a descriptive prefix) question mark paragraph separator
Grammar
Simple Amharic sentences
One may construct simple Amharic sentences by using a subject and a predicate. Here are a few simple sentences:
Pronouns
Personal pronouns Amharic grammar distinguishes person, number, and often gender. This includes personal pronouns such as English I, Amharic ; English she, Amharic . As in other Semitic languages, the same distinctions appear in three other places in their grammar.
Subject–verb agreement All Amharic verbs agree with their subjects; that is, the person, number, and (in the second- and third-person singular) gender of the subject of the verb are marked by suffixes or prefixes on the verb. Because the affixes that signal subject agreement vary greatly with the particular verb tense/aspect/mood, they are normally not considered to be pronouns and are discussed elsewhere in this article under verb conjugation. Object pronoun suffixes Amharic verbs often have additional morphology that indicates the person, number, and (second- and third-person singular) gender of the object of the verb.