The Amharic language is spoken by the Amhara, an ethnic group in the central highlands of Ethiopia. The Amhara comprise approximately 30 percent of the population, with 27 million speakers. An additional 7-15 million people speak it as a second language. It has been the working language of government, the military, and of the Ethiopic Orthodox church.
Semitic languages, of which Amharic is one, represent a family of languages spoken by more than 300 million people across the Middle East, North Africa, and the horn of Africa. After Arabic, Amharic is the second most spoken Semitic language in the world. In addition to Ethiopia, Amharic is the language of some 2.7 million emigrants. The largest population of émigrés live in Egypt, Israel, and Sweden. The Amharic language is also spoken in Eritrea by some Eritreans as a vestige of past years when Eritrea was part of the Ethiopia.
Amharic is written in the Ge’ez alphabet. As in many languages, there is no agreed upon manner of transliterating the Amharic language into Roman characters.
As in other Ethiopian Semitic languages, germination (i.e. occurs when a spoken consonant is pronounced for an audibly longer period of time than a short consonant). is contrastive in Amharic. Therefore, consonant length can distinguish words from one another. Germination is not indicated in Amharic writing orthography, but with relatively few pairs of words or phrases, which differ in only one phonological element, such as these, Amharic readers seem not to find this to be a problem.
Source: http://www.ArticlePros.com/author.php?Jacob Lumbroso
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