Basic Facts about the Amharic Language



Posted: Sunday, October 07, 2007

by
Ultimate Language Store

The Amharic language is spoken by the Amhara ethnic group which lives in the central highlands of the country of Ethiopia . The Amhara people comprise approximately 30 percent of the Ethiopia ’s population. An additional 7-15 million people speak it as a second language. It is established as the working language of government institutions, the Ethiopian military, and of the Ethiopic Orthodox church. Amharic is also the language of some 2.7 million Ethiopian emigrants. The largest population of expatriates live in Egypt , Israel , and Sweden . Increasing numbers of Ethiopians have emigrated to the United States in recent years.

Amharic is a Semitic language. Amharic language represents a family of languages spoken by more than 300 million people across the Middle East, North Africa, and the horn of Africa . After Arabic, Amharic is the second most spoken Semitic language in the world. According to Lionel Bender & Hailu Fulass, Semitic languages can be divided into two categories. The two primary categories are Western Semitic and Eastern Semitic. Western Semitic can be further divided into Southern and Central families and it is from the Southern Semitic branch, that Arabic and Amharic languages are derived. Amharic is written in the Ge'ez alphabet.

As in other Ethiopian Semitic languages, germination (i.e. occurs when a spoken consonant is pronounced for an audibly longer period of time than a short consonant). is contrastive in Amharic. Therefore, consonant length can distinguish words from one another. Germination is not indicated in Amharic writing orthography, but with relatively few pairs of words or phrases, which differ in only one phonological element, such as these, Amharic readers seem not to find this to be a problem.

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