Amharic

Amharic (Laurie Bauer, 2007, The Linguistics Student's Handbook, Edinburgh; Collins English Dictionary (2003), Random House Kernerman Webster's College Dictionary (2010) or ; Amharic: , , ) is an Afroasiatic language of the Semitic branch and is a member of the Ethiosemitic group. It is spoken as a mother tongue by the Amhara and other populations residing in major cities and towns of Ethiopia. The language serves as the official working language of Ethiopia, and is also the official or working language of several of the states within the federal system. With approximately ~62 million speakers, Amharic is the second-most widely spoken Semitic language in the world after Arabic.
Amharic is written left-to-right using the Amharic Fidel , which grew out of the Ge'ez abugida—called, in Ethiopian Semitic languages fidel ("writing system", "letter", or "character") and abugida (from the first four Ethiopic letters, which gave rise to the modern linguistic term abugida).
There is no agreed way of transliterating Amharic into Roman characters. The Amharic examples in the sections below use one system that is common, though not universal, among linguists specialising in Ethiopian Semitic languages.
== Background ==
It has been the working language of courts, language of trade and everyday communications, the military, and the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church since the late 12th century and remains the official language of Ethiopia today. As of the 2007 census, Amharic is spoken by 21.6 million native speakers in Ethiopia and 4 million secondary speakers in Ethiopia. Additionally, 3 million emigrants outside of Ethiopia speak the language. Most of the Ethiopian Jewish communities in Ethiopia and Israel speak Amharic. In Washington DC, Amharic became one of the six non-English languages in the Language Access Act of 2004, which allows government services and education in Amharic. Furthermore, Amharic is considered a holy language by the Rastafari (ራስ ተፈሪ) religion and is widely used among its followers worldwide. It is the most widely spoken language in the Horn of Africa.http://catalog.ihsn.org/index.php/catalog/3583/download/50086
== Phonology ==
 Consonants 
 	 	Bilabial 	Alveolar 	Palatal 	Velar 	Glottal
Nasal 	Nasal 	 	 	 	 	
Plosive 	voiceless 	 	 	 	 	
Plosive 	voiced 	 	 	 	 	
Plosive 	ejective 	 	 	 	 	
Affricate 	voiceless 	 	 	 	 	
Affricate 	voiced 	 	 	 	 	
Affricate 	ejective 	 	 	 	 	
Fricative 	voiceless 	 	 	 	 	
Fricative 	voiced 	* 	 	 	 	
Approximant 	Approximant 	 	 	 	 	
Rhotic 	Rhotic 	 	 	 	 	
* – Only in loanwords	* – Only in loanwords	* – Only in loanwords	* – Only in loanwords	* – Only in loanwords	* – Only in loanwords	* – Only in loanwords
The Amharic ejective consonants correspond to the Proto-Semitic "emphatic consonants", usually transcribed with a dot below the letter. The consonant and vowel tables give these symbols in parentheses where they differ from the standard IPA symbols.
Vowels
 	Front	Central	Back
High	 	(ə) 	
Mid 	 	(ä) 	
Low 	 	 	
==Writing system==
The Amharic script is an abugida, and the graphemes of the Amharic writing system are called fidel.Hudson, Grover. "Amharic". The World's Major Languages. 2009. Print. Ed. Comrie, Bernard. Oxon and New York: Routledge. pp. 594–617. . 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: , , , and (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.
===Alphasyllabary===
Chart of Amharic fidels
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