ABSTRACT
Tigre is spoken mainly in Eritrea, and is the northernmost Ethiopian Semitic tongue. The majority of speakers are Muslims (above 60 percent); most of the rest are Christians. The number of speakers is put at between quarter and half a million (according to the Ministry of Education of Eritrea, February 1997, it is about 800,000). The Mansa' dialect is the only speech which has a corpus of written material, and as such may approach the concept of standard language. Written material consists of Bible translations, especially by members of the Swedish Evangelical mission, collections of texts in prose and verse and grammatical work by missionaries and European scholars. Two varieties of speech may be mentioned: first, that of the nomad tribe of Beni 'Amer who live close to the border with the Sudan. They are bilinguals, the other language they speak being the nonSemitic Beja, which is the substrate Cushitic language of Tigre as a whole. Their Tigre differs in many ways from that of Mansa'. Secondly, the Tigre language is used as a lingua franca along the Ethiopian coast of the Red Sea, notably in Massawa where it is is heavily influenced by spoken Arabic, which is another language medium in the same area.
