Ge'ez Language

Ge'ez Language

Ge'ez (ግዕዝ, Gəʿəz ; also transliterated Gi'iz, and less precisely called Ethiopic) is an ancient South Semitic language that originated in the northern region of Ethiopia and southern Eritrea in the Horn of Africa. It later became the official language of the Kingdom of Aksum and Ethiopian imperial court.

Today Ge'ez remains only as the main language used in the liturgy of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church, the Ethiopian Catholic Church, and also the Beta Israel Jewish community. However, in Ethiopia Amharic (the main lingua franca of modern Ethiopia) or other local languages, and in Eritrea and Tigray Region in Ethiopia, Tigrinya may be used for sermons. Tigrinya and Tigre are closely related to Ge'ez, but their exact relationship remains controversial, with at least four different configurations proposed. Some linguists do not believe that Ge'ez constitutes the common ancestor of modern Ethiopian languages, but that Ge'ez became a separate language early on from some hypothetical, completely unattested language, and can thus be seen an extinct sister language of Tigre and Tigrinya. The foremost Ethiopian experts such as Amsalu Aklilu point to the vast proportion of inherited nouns that are unchanged, and even spelled identically in both Ge'ez and Amharic (and to a lesser degree, Tigrinya).