Amharic

Amharic is an Ethio-Semitic language, which is a subgrouping within the Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic languages. It is spoken as a first language by the Amhara people, and also serves as a lingua franca for all other metropolitan populations in Ethiopia.

The language serves as the official working language of the Ethiopian federal government, and is also the official or working language of several of Ethiopia's federal regions. In 2020 in Ethiopia, it had over 33.7 million mother-tongue speakers of which 31 million are ethnically Amhara, and more than 25.1 million second language speakers in 2019, making the total number of speakers over 58.8 million. Amharic is the largest, most widely spoken language in Ethiopia, and the most spoken mother-tongue in Ethiopia. Amharic is also the second most widely spoken Semitic language in the world (after Arabic).

Amharic is written left-to-right using a system that grew out of the Geʽez script. The segmental writing system in which consonant-vowel sequences are written as units is called an abugida (አቡጊዳ). The graphemes are called fidäl (ፊደል), which means 'script, alphabet, letter, character'.

There is no universally agreed-upon Romanization of Amharic into Latin script. The Amharic examples in the sections below use one system that is common among linguists specializing in Ethiopian Semitic languages.