Amharic Transcription Services

Amharic is a Semitic language spoken in Ethiopia. It is the second-most spoken Semitic language in the world, after Arabic, and the official working language of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia. Amharic is also the official or working language of several of the states within the federal system. It has been the working language of government, the military, and the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church throughout medieval and modern times. The 2007 census counted nearly 22 million native speakers in Ethiopia. Outside Ethiopia, Amharic is the language of some 2.7 million emigrants. It is written (left-to-right) using Amharic Fidel, ፊደል, which grew out of the Ge’ez abugida—called, in Ethiopian Semitic languages, ፊደል fidel (“writing system”, “letter”, or “character”) and አቡጊዳ abugida (from the first four Ethiopic letters, which gave rise to the modern linguistic term abugida).

There is no agreed way of transliterating Amharic into Roman characters. The Amharic examples in the sections below use one system that is common, though not universal, among linguists specializing in Ethiopian Semitic languages.

Writing system

The Ethiopic (or Ge’ez) writing system is visible on the side of this Ethiopian Airlines Fokker 50: it reads “Ethiopia’s”: የኢትዮጵያ ye-Ītyōṗṗyā.

The Amharic script is an abugida, and the graphs of the Amharic writing system are called fidel. Each character represents a consonant + vowel sequence, but the basic shape of each character is determined by the consonant, which is modified for the vowel. Some consonant phonemes are written by more than one series of characters: /ʔ/, /s/, /sʼ/, and /h/ (the last one has four distinct letter forms). This is because these fidel originally represented distinct sounds, but phonological changes merged them. The citation form for each series is the consonant + ä form, i.e. the first column of the fidel. A font that supports Ethiopic, such as GF Zemen Unicode, is needed to see fidel on typical modern computer systems.

Dialects

There has not been much published about Amharic dialect differences. All dialects are mutually intelligible, but certain minor variations are noted. Mittwoch described a form of Amharic spoken by the descendants of Weyto language speakers, but it was likely not a dialect of Amharic so much as the result of incomplete language learning as the community shifted languages from Weyto to Amharic.

Literature

There is a growing body of literature in Amharic in many genres. This literature includes government proclamations and records, educational books, religious material, novels, poetry, proverb collections, dictionaries (monolingual and bilingual), technical manuals, medical topics, etc. The Holy Bible was first translated into Amharic by Abu Rumi in the early 19th century, but other transcriptions of the Bible into Amharic have been done since. The most famous Amharic novel is Fiqir Iske Meqabir (transliterated various ways) by Haddis Alemayehu (1909–2003), translated into English by Sisay Ayenew with the title Love unto Crypt, published in 2005.