Tigrinya

Where it’s spoken

Tigrinya is the working language of Eritrea (alongside Arabic and English) and the official language of the Tigray Region in northern Ethiopia. About 7 million people speak it as a first language. Significant Eritrean and Tigrayan diaspora communities have grown in Israel, Sudan, Germany, Sweden, the UK, and the United States since the 1980s and 1990s wars.

What it sounds like

Tigrinya retains many archaic Semitic features more conservatively than Amharic — including more elaborate pharyngeal sounds, full ejective stop series (p’, t’, tʃ’, k’, s’), and labialized velars (kʷ, gʷ). Its verb system uses templatic root-and-pattern morphology.

How it’s written

Tigrinya uses the Geʽez (Ethiopic) script, the same abugida used for Amharic and the ancient Geʽez language. Each character represents a consonant plus a specific vowel; the basic 33 consonants each have seven vowel forms, yielding well over 200 syllograms in regular use.

History

Tigrinya descends from Geʽez, the classical Semitic language of the Aksumite Empire (first millennium CE), through medieval changes. Its literary tradition is relatively modern but has flourished since Eritrean independence in 1993.