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In terms of writing systems, Ethiopia's principal orthography is the Ge'ez script, employed as an abugida for several of the country's languages. For instance, it was the primary writing system for Afan Oromo until 1991.
Ethio-Semitic (also Ethiopian Semitic, Ethiosemitic, Ethiopic or Abyssinian [2]) is a family of languages spoken in Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Sudan. [1] They form the western branch of the South Semitic languages , itself a sub-branch of Semitic , part of the Afroasiatic language family .
Saho language; Saho–Afar languages; Sebat Bet Gurage language; Seze language; Shakacho language; Sheko language; Shinasha language; Sidama language; Siltʼe language; Soddo language; Somali language; Southern Oromo language; Suri language; Surmic languages
Until 2020 Amharic was the sole official language of Ethiopia. [18] [19] [3] [20] [21] The 2007 census reported that Amharic was spoken by 21.6 million native speakers in Ethiopia. [22] More recent sources state the number of first-language speakers in 2018 as nearly 32 million, with another 25 million second-language speakers in Ethiopia. [11]
The Ethiopian language area is a hypothesized linguistic area that was first proposed by Charles A. Ferguson (1970, 1976), who posited a number of phonological and morphosyntactic features that were found widely across Ethiopia and Eritrea, including the Ethio-Semitic, Cushitic and Omotic languages but not the Nilo-Saharan languages.
Hadiyya (speakers call it Hadiyyisa, others sometimes call it Hadiyigna, Adiya, Adea, Adiye, Hadia, Hadiya, Hadya) is the language of the Hadiya people of Ethiopia. Over 1.2 million speakers of Hadiyya, making it one of the ten major languages in Ethiopia. It is a Highland East Cushitic language of the Afroasiatic family.
The Omotic languages are a group of languages spoken in southwestern Ethiopia, in the Omo River region and southeastern Sudan in Blue Nile State. The Geʽez script is used to write some of the Omotic languages, the Latin script for some others. They are fairly agglutinative and have complex tonal systems (for example, the Bench language).
Highland East Cushitic or Burji-Sidamo is a branch of the Afroasiatic language family spoken in south-central Ethiopia. They are often grouped with Lowland East Cushitic, Dullay, and Yaaku as East Cushitic. The most popular language is Sidama, with close to two million speakers. The languages are: