Language
The official language in Ethiopia is the Amharic language, a Semitic language which is spoken by 21,631,370 people or 29.33% of the population (2.7 million expatriate). Amharic is written with the Ge'ez script, which derives its name from the ancient Semitic Ge'ez language. Ge'ez is largely extinct as a productive language but is still in liturgical use by the Beta Israel Jewish community and the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church. However, the largest language in Ethiopia is the Oromo language, a Cushitic language spoken by 33.8% of the population. The Tigrinya language is related to Amharic, but mostly spoken in northern Ethiopia in the state of Tigray.
Read more about this topic: Culture Of Ethiopia
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“Play for young children is not recreation activity,... It is not leisure-time activity nor escape activity.... Play is thinking time for young children. It is language time. Problem-solving time. It is memory time, planning time, investigating time. It is organization-of-ideas time, when the young child uses his mind and body and his social skills and all his powers in response to the stimuli he has met.”
—James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century)
“The hypothesis I wish to advance is that ... the language of morality is in ... grave disorder.... What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.”
—Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre (b. 1929)