Amharic Language Services

Amharic is a Semitic language spoken in North Central Ethiopia by the Amhara. It is the second most-spoken Semitic language in the world, after Arabic, and the official working language of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia. Thus, it has official status and is used nationwide. Amharic is also the official or working language of several of the states within the federal system, including the Amhara Region and the multi-ethnic Southern Nations, Nationalities, and People’s Region, among others. It has been the working language of government, the military, and of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church throughout medieval and modern times. Outside Ethiopia, Amharic is the language of some 2.7 million emigrants (notably in Canada, United States, and Sweden). It is written using Amharic Fidel, which grew out of the Ge’ez abugida—called, in Ethiopian Semitic languages, fidel (“alphabet”, “letter,” or “character”) and abugida (from the first four Ethiopic letters which gave rise to the modern linguistic term abugida). Writing system The Amharic script is an abugida, and the graphs of the Amharic writing system are called fidel. 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: /ʔ/, /s/, /sʼ/, and /h/ (the last one has four distinct letter forms). This is because these fidel 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 fidel. Dialects There has not been much published about Amharic dialect differences. All dialects are mutually intelligible, but certain minor variations are noted. Mittwoch described a form of Amharic spoken by the descendants of Weyto language speakers, but it was likely not a dialect of Amharic so much as the result of incomplete language learning as the community shifted languages from Weyto to Amharic. Literature There is a growing body of literature in Amharic in many genres. This literature includes government proclamations and records, educational books, religious material, novels, poetry, proverb collections, dictionaries (monolingual and bilingual), technical manuals, medical topics, etc. The Holy Bible was first translated into Amharic by Abu Rumi in the early 19th century, but other translations of the Bible into Amharic have been done since.