ABSTRACT
Amharic is the second most populous Semitic language, after Arabic, with some 20 million speakers (16 million of the 1994 Ethiopian census + expected growth rate to 2009). Amharic has long been the lingua franca of Ethiopia, and, despite recent movement toward local-language primary education, in most schools still the language of instruction in the early grades. (Since the late 1940s, English has been the language of secondary and higher education.) It is recognised in the 1994 constitution as the ‘working language’ of Ethiopian government. Amharic is spoken as a second language by additional millions of Ethiopian urban
dwellers, and Amharic readers certainly represent the large majority of the reported Ethiopian literacy rate of 42 per cent. The internal grouping of Semitic languages is controversial, but three branches are
usually mentioned: northeast, northwest and south. Northwest includes Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic; northeast anciently known and long extinct Akkadian-Babylonian; and southern Semitic the ancient and modern languages native to South Arabia plus those of Ethiopia and Eritrea, of which there are some thirteen: Tigre and Tigrinya of Eritrea, with Tigrinya also spoken by some 3.5 million in Ethiopia; in Ethiopia are Amharic, Soddo (also known as Kistane), Mesqan, Chaha with several named dialects; Inor also with several named dialects, Argobba a language not quite mutually intelligible with Amharic, Harari (Adare), Silt’e with several named dialects, and Zay. Ethiopian Semitic Gafat has been extinct for some decades, and Ge‘ez, for which there are epigraphic records dating from perhaps 2500 BP, survives as the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Ge‘ez seems not to be the ancestor of any modern language. The traditional home of Amharic is mountainous north-central Ethiopia, and Amharic
dialects are recognised in the regions of Begemder, Gojjam, Menz-Wello and Shoa. These differ by features of pronunciation and grammatical morphology. The Ethiopian capital city Addis Ababa, Shoa, is the centre of Ethiopian political, economic and social life, and the Amharic variety of Addis Ababa has become recognised as prestigious.
