If you have been making searches like “English to Amharic”, “Translate English to Amharic”, “Amharic to English”, or “English to Amharic translation”, then our linguists are here to help.

Amharic is a Semitic language that belongs to the Afro-Asiatic languages. It descends from Ge’ez, which is an extinct language, but has many borrowings from English and is one of the five official languages of Ethiopia, where there are up to 100 different languages and 200 dialects. In Ethiopia it is an administrative, business, media and national education language. In addition, Amharic is also present in Eritrea, Egypt, Israel and Sweden. After Arabic, it is the second most popular Semitic language with almost 32 million native speakers and another 25 million who use it as a second language in Ethiopia. In addition, there are 3 million migrants outside Ethiopia who also speak it. Interestingly, Rastafarians consider it a sacred language.

As for the writing system,  it writes from left to right in Ethiopian script and has its own alphabet, with a total of 231 signs representing syllables. This syllabary is called “fidel/fidäl” or “abugida”. These syllables form when the consonant and vowel systems of the language are combined.

OTHER INTERESTING FACTS

There are several ways to differentiate the female gender from the male gender. There are certain words in which the suffix -t goes at the end of the word while others use the suffix -it. Although the ending -it is also used in masculine nouns. An interesting feature is that the feminine suffix can indicate gender and also express tenderness or the diminutive of something.

Literature in this language is growing and covers many genres. This literature includes government records, educational books, religious material, novels, poetry, collections of proverbs, dictionaries, technical manuals, medical writings, etc. Abu Rumi first translated the Bible into Amharic in the early 19th century, but other translations have been made since then. The most famous novel is Fiqir Iske Meqabir, which Haddis Alemayeh wrote.