With 57,500,000 total speakers as of 2019, including around 25,100,000second language speakers,Amharic is the most widely spoken of the group, the most widely spokenlanguage of Ethiopia and second-most widely spoken Semitic language in the world afterArabic.[5][6]Tigrinya has 7 million speakers and is the most widely spoken language in Eritrea.[7][8]Tigre is the second-most spoken language in Eritrea, and has also a small population of speakers in Sudan. TheGeʽez language has a literary history in its ownGeʽez script going back to the first century AD. It is no longer spoken but remains the liturgical language of theEthiopian andEritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Churches, as well as their respectiveEastern Catholic counterparts.
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The unity of the Ethio-Semitic languages has been usually assumed.[clarification needed] However, they do not share many common innovations. A possibility was entertained byMarcel Cohen andHarold C. Fleming that they could represent two separate branches of Semitic that had independently migrated to Africa. Current research regardless outlines reasons to consider the Ethiopian Semitic languages a single group, and notes an absence of reasons for any alternative classification within Semitic.
Agent noun formation with a vowel patternCaCāCi, e.g.√kʼtʼl 'to kill' → *kʼatʼāli 'killer';[9][10]
Shared innovative vocabulary, such as √kʼyħ 'to be red', √mwkʼ 'to be warm', √nbr 'to sit', √ndd 'to burn', *ħamad- 'ashes', *marayt- 'earth'.[11]
A unique "causative-reflexive" prefix *ʔasta-, combining two Proto-Semitic causative prefixes *ʔa-, *š- and the reflexive-passive marker *-t-, is productive in Ge'ez and has left occasional remnants in Tigre, Tigrinya and Amharic, but is not known as an independent prefix in the smaller languages. A similar but shorter innovative formation *ʔat- has arisen in the languages other than Ge'ez, and it is possible *ʔasta- was a Proto-Ethio-Semitic innovation that later lost productivity.[9]
All Ethiopian Semitic languages haveejective consonants, and the more northern languages havebroken plurals, which were formerly seen as evidence for their connection with theModern South Arabian languages. Today these are however considered to be archaic features inherited fromProto-Semitic, which were lost in most or all of the Central Semitic languages such as Arabic, Aramaic and Hebrew.[10]
Thelinguistic homeland of the South Semitic languages was widely debated, with some sources, such as A. Murtonen (1967) and Lionel Bender (1997),[12] suggesting an origin in Ethiopia, and others suggesting the southern portion of theArabian Peninsula.[13]
More recently (2009), a study based on aBayesian model suggested a South Arabian origin, with Semitic languages being introduced fromsouthern Arabia some 2,800 years ago.[14] This statistical analysis could not estimate when or where the ancestor of all Semitic languages diverged from Afroasiatic, but it suggested that the divergence of East, Central, and South Semitic branches most likely occurred in theLevant.[14] According to other scholars,Semitic originated from an offshoot of a still earlier language inNorth Africa, perhaps in the southeasternSahara, anddesertification forced its inhabitants to migrate in the fourth millennium BCE – some southeast into what is nowEthiopia, others northeast out of Africa intoCanaan,Syria and theMesopotamian valley.[15]
A primary division of Ethiopic into northern and southern branches was proposed by Cohen (1931) and Hetzron (1972) and garnered broad acceptance, but has not been followed as such in more recent studies.[10] Rainer Voigt[16] argues that features traditionally used to define the Northern and Southern group are not exclusive to them but also found in some languages of the other group, while others do not cover the entire group. Bulakh and Kogan[9][17] agree on rejecting North Ethiopian Semitic, and point to several unique features particularly in Ge'ez and Tigre; they continue to support the broad Southern group, but not Hetzron's Transversal Southern grouping of Amharic–Argobba and Harari–East Gurage.
^Although Dahalik is not included on the main tree chart on page 289, Hudson notes on page 9 that other linguists have demonstrated a close relationship between it and Tigre and tentatively classifies it as having split from Tigre when examining Hetzron (1972)'s classification on page 45.[22][23]
^abcdBulakh, Maria; Kogan, Leonid (2012). "The Genealogical Position of Tigre and the Problem of North Ethio-Semitic Unity".Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft (160):273–302.
^abcdeWeninger, Stefan (2012). "Ethio-Semitic in General". In Weninger, Stefan (ed.).The Semitic Languages: an International Handbook. de Gruyter Mouton. pp. 1114–1123.
^abKogan, Leonid (2015). "Lexical isoglosses and the historical unity of Ethiopian Semitic".Genealogical Classification of Semitic. De Gruyter.ISBN978-1-61451-726-9.
^Bender, L. (1997). "Upside Down Afrasian".Afrikanistische Arbeitspapiere.50:19–34.
^Hetzron, Robert (1972).Ethiopian Semitic: Studies in Classification. Manchester University Press. p. 122.ISBN9780719011238.
^Bulakh, Maria; Kogan, Leonid (2014). "More on Genealogical Classification of Ethiopian Semitic".Babel und Bibel (7).
^For its membership in North Ethiopic, seeLeslau, Wolf (1970). "Ethiopic and South Arabian".Linguistics in South West Asia and North Africa. The Hague. p. 467.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link), andFaber, Alice (2005). "Genetic Subgrouping of the Semitic Languages".The Semitic Languages.Routledge. pp. 6–7..
Hetzron, Robert (1972).Ethiopian Semitic: studies in classification. Manchester:Manchester University Press.
Weninger, Stefan. "Vom Altäthiopischen zu den neuäthiopischen Sprachen" [From Old Ethiopian to the New Ethiopian Languages]. In Haspelmath, Martin; König, Ekkehard; Oesterreicher, Wulf; Raible, Wolfgang (eds.).Language Typology and Language Universals (in German). Vol. 2. Berlin:Walter de Gruyter. pp. 1762–1774.
Hudson, Grover (2013).Northeast African Semitic: Lexical Comparisons and Analysis. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. p. 289.ISBN9783447069830.
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