Amharic Language Guide

Official language in
Ethiopia
Script
Ethiopic

Where it's spoken

Amharic is the working language of the Federal Government of Ethiopia. Ethiopia's constitution gives all Ethiopian languages equal state recognition and lets the individual members of the federation determine their own working languages by law. Amharic also serves as a lingua franca in almost all parts of the country.

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Script & pronunciation

Amharic is written in the Ethiopic script, which is named for the older liturgical language Ge'ez that the script was first devised for; the same script has since been adopted for writing Amharic and several other languages of the region. In Ethiopic, the syllables are traditionally organized as a matrix crossed by consonant and vowel, with each sign in the matrix representing one syllable formed from a consonant and a vowel together. Ethiopic traditionally uses its own word-divider character rather than a Latin-style space between words, although a plain space has become common in modern use. This app's phrase cards give the Ge'ez text together with a Latin-letter transliteration in the romanization field, as in ሰላም (Selam, "hello").

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Grammar essentials

Amharic's basic word order is subject–object–verb, and linguists describe it overall as a well-behaved verb-final language, so the verb typically comes at the end of the sentence. This app's cards show the pattern directly: ስብሰባ ማዘጋጀት እፈልጋለሁ (Sibseba mazegajet ifeligalehu, "I'd like to schedule a meeting") puts the object first and the verb "I want" last. Amharic verbs are negated with a negative prefix together with a suffix that closes the sentence. In this app's cards, እኔ ቪጋን ነኝ፣ ምንም የእንስሳት ምርት አልመገብም። (Ene vigan negn, minim ye'insisat mirt almegebim., "I'm vegan and don't eat any animal products.") shows a negative verb form, አልመገብም (almegebim), built this way.

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Politeness & etiquette

Amharic marks politeness partly through pronoun choice: informal "you" has separate masculine and feminine forms, while a single polite pronoun, እርስዎ (irswo), is used for anyone the speaker wants to address respectfully, regardless of the addressee's gender. A course on spoken Amharic notes that verbs used with this polite pronoun take the same endings as third-person plural verbs, rather than the singular endings used with the informal forms. This app's cards show both registers: the informal, masculine እንደምን አደርህ? (Indemin aderh?, "How are you?") is marked for a male addressee, and a separate feminine form is used for a female addressee, while the polite pronoun appears in ከእርስዎ ጋር ለመሥራት ጉጉ ነኝ (Ke'irswo gar lemesrat gugu negn, "I look forward to working with you").

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