Amharic is an Afroasiatic language of the Semitic branch and is a member of the Ethiosemitic group.
It is spoken as a mother tongue by the Amhara, and other populations residing in major cities and towns of Ethiopia.
The language serves as the official working language of Ethiopia, and is also the official or working language of several of the states within the federal system.
With approximately 22 million speakers as of 2007, Amharic is the second-most commonly spoken Semitic language in the world after Arabic.
Amharic is written left-to-right using a script that grew out of the Ge'ez abugida – called, in the Ethiopian Semitic languages, fidel (ፊደል, "writing system", "letter", or "character") and abugida (አቡጊዳ, from the first four Ethiopic letters, which gave rise to the modern linguistic term abugida).
Ge'ez, also known as Ethiopic, is a script used as an abugida (alphasyllabary) for several languages of Ethiopia and Eritrea. It originated as an abjad (consonant-only alphabet) and was first used to write Ge'ez, now the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church and the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church. In Amharic and Tigrinya, the script is often called fidäl (ፊደል), meaning "script" or "alphabet".
The Ge'ez script has been adapted to write other, mostly Semitic, languages, particularly Amharic in Ethiopia, and Tigrinya in both Eritrea and Ethiopia. It is also used for Sebatbeit, Me'en, and most other languages of Ethiopia. In Eritrea it is used for Tigre, and it has traditionally been used for Blin, a Cushitic language. Tigre, spoken in western and northern Eritrea, is considered to resemble Ge'ez more than do the other derivative languages. Some other languages in the Horn of Africa, such as Oromo, used to be written using Ge'ez, but have migrated to Latin-based orthographies.
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