
It offers a simple and quick way of understanding Amharic and getting to comprehend it for the purpose of proper articulation of the language. The grid below shows the Amharic alphabet with english intonation and pronunciations. In the Amharic alphabet, letters are organised in a grid system where consonants appear vertically and their vowel-added variants, horizontally. These variants are created by appending a vowel to each consonant, to make up the syllabary of around 500 Amharic letters. Saying goodbye in the plural (to more than one person), would be (dehna hoonu). Each of the 31 consonant letters come with seven variants. If you want to say goodbye to someone in Ethiopia, when talking to a male, you’d use (dehna hoon), and when talking to a female, you’d say (dehna hoonyi). The Amharic alphabet contains seven vowels and 31 consonant letters.
Amharic pronunciation how to#
If you are looking to learn the Amharic language, understanding the Amharic alphabet can help you shorten the time it takes to master the language.Ĭontinue reading to learn how to read, write and pronounce Amharic letters. It includes extra letters such as ቸ (Ce), ሸ (She), ጨ (Che) which are not in Ge’ez script. The version, which the Amharic language uses is called Fidel or most commonly, Amharic Alphabet. These Ethiopian alphabets are closely similar and only differ with the addition or omission of a few Ge’ez letters. Each of these languages have their own version of the Ethiopain alphabet which are all created from the Ge’ez script. Auto Detect, Tigrinya, English, German, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Spanish, Amharic, Arabic, Estonian, Finnish, French, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi. 16 17 3 18 census reported that Amharic was spoken by 21.6 million native speakers in Ethiopia. Each letter represents one consonant (or consonant cluster) and one vowel. The Amharic letters ( ) in the second chart have the consonants in rows and the vowels in columns.

Until 2020 Amharic was the sole official language of Ethiopia. The charts below show the way in which the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) represents Amharic pronunciations in Wikipedia articles. Tigrinya, Adarigna, Guragigna are some of the other Ethiopian languages that use the script. There are 33 basic characters, each of which has seven forms depending on which vowel is to be pronounced in the syllable. The script is the only actively used native African writing system and one of the oldest in the world.

Ge'ez script descended from the Ancient South Arabian script is written from left to right. Another informal greeting used in Ethiopia is (tadias), which means hi in English. It is also used as the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church. The most common way to say hello in Amharic is (selam), which is considered a relatively informal greeting.

Ge’ez is a language of ancient Ethiopia and the precursor of Semitic languages in Ethiopia and Eritrea. Amharic uses a writing system called Ge’ez script, which is an ancient alphasyllabary used by several Semitic languages of Ethiopia.
