page_title: Amharic
section_title: Writing system
hierarchical_section_title: Amharic / Writing system
caption_attribution_description: English: A Coca-Cola bottle in Amharic
context_page_description: Amharic is an Ethio-Semitic language, which is a subgrouping within the Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic languages. It is spoken as a first language by the Amharas and as a lingua franca by other populations residing in major cities and towns of Ethiopia.
  The Amharic language possibly originated as result of a pidginization process with a Cushitic substratum and a Semitic superstratum to enable communication between people who spoke a mix of different languages. This pidginization of the new language had enabled the soldiers to create communication means independent of the Church, which used the Ge'ez language.
  The language serves as the working language of Ethiopia, and is also the working language of several of the states within the Ethiopian federal system. With 21,811,600 total speakers as of 2007, including around 4,000,000 second language speakers, Amharic is the second-most common language of Ethiopia and second-most commonly spoken Semitic language in the world.
  Amharic is written left-to-right using a system that grew out of the Ge'ez script. The writing system is called fidäl in Ethiopian Semitic languages. Fidäl means "script", "alphabet", "letter", or "character".
context_section_description: The Amharic script is an abugida, and the graphemes of the Amharic writing system are called fidel. Each character represents a consonant+vowel sequence, but the basic shape of each character is determined by the consonant, which is modified for the vowel. Some consonant phonemes are written by more than one series of characters: /ʔ/, /s/, /sʼ/, and /h/ (the last one has four distinct letter forms). This is because these fidel originally represented distinct sounds, but phonological changes merged them. The citation form for each series is the consonant+ä form, i.e. the first column of the fidel. The Amharic script is included in Unicode, and glyphs are included in fonts available with major operating systems.
caption: A modern usage of Amharic: the label of a Coca-Cola bottle. The script reads ኮካ-ኮላ (koka-kola).
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