Amharic Alphabet

The Amharic Alphabet

The Amharic alphabet is a Ge’ez alphabet system used for Amharic and other semitic languages of Ethiopia. Ge’ez is a language of ancient Ethiopia and the precursor of Amharic and Tigrigna languages in Ethiopia and Eritrea. It is also used as the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church where it originated from.

The Amharic alphabet (Fidel), the only actively used native African writing system, is the official Ethiopian alphabet. The alphabet consists of 31 consonant letters each of which has seven variations. These variations are created by appending a vowel to each consonant, to make up the syllabary of around 500 Amharic letters.

In addition to the 31 consonants and their variations, the Amharic Fidel has five vowels and its own numeral system. The alphabet includes nine punctuation marks: section mark, colon, word separator, semicolon, question mark, comma, paragraph separator and period.

The Ge’ez Alphabet

The Ge’ez alphabet also known as the Ethiopian alphabet is a forebear writing script or system of the Amharic, Tigrigna and other semetic language alphabets in Ethiopia. These Ethiopian alphabets are closely similar and only differ with the addition or omission of a few Ge’ez letters. The Amharic alphabet letters include extra letters such as ቸ (Ce), ሸ (She), ጨ (Che) which are not in Ge’ez alphabet. See the table above to learn Amharic alphabet with english intonation and pronunciations.