Amharic
Amharic is the national and official language of Ethiopia, where it is
spoken as a native language by about 12 million people, and as a second
language by many more. Though only one of the seventy or so languages spoken
in Ethiopia, Amharic has been the language of the court and of the dominant
population group in Highland Ethiopia since at least the late 13th century.
It belongs to the Semitic family of languages and, as such, is related
to Arabic and Hebrew. However, while many of the grammatical forms are
reminiscent of the latter languages, the sentence structure (syntax) of
Amharic is very different and has more in common with the non-Semitic
languages of Ethiopia.
The origins of the language and its people trace back to the 1st millenium B.C. when immigrants from southwestern Arabia crossed the Red Sea into present-day Eritrea and mixed with the Cushitic population there. Eventually the powerful Axum empire was established in Northern Ethiopia. At first, Ge‘ez was the classical language of Axum, but when the power base of Ethiopia shifted from Axum to Amhara between the 10th and 12th century A.D., the use of the Amharic language spread its influence, later becoming the national language. Amharic is written using a syllabary (each character represents a syllable) which originated from the Ge‘ez alphabet. It has 33 basic characters with 7 forms for each consonant-vowel combination. Unlike Arabic, Hebrew or Syrian, the language is written from left to right.
Sources:
FLW, Inc.
Generation
-X International, Child of the World
Information on Writing System:
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UCSD International Center
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Mingei museum of folk art