Amharic acts as the lingua franca of Africa’s second most populous country and is the most widely used and standardized language, with at least 25 million people who speak it. There are normally Amharic speakers almost anywhere you travel in Ethiopia. Most of them will appreciate your willingness to speak their language, if you take Amharic lessons to learn Amharic before you go.

Amharic is used by the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church since medieval times. It is important for the millions of Ethiopians living abroad. It is a beautiful, expressive and lively language, used in books, poems, music, drama, law, debate and stand-up comedy. Learning Amharic will help you to appreciate a great culture and history as well as a great present and future nation.

Amharic is a Semitic language and derives from the ancient Ge’ez, which is still used as the liturgical language in the Orthodox Church. Amharic is believed to have originated as a court language in the 13th and 14th centuries AD (Ge’ez may have been developed 1,700-1,800 years ago). It is written left to right and uses Ge’ez characters, which are called “fidel”. A fidel includes both a consonant and a vowel. Our Amharic lessons will also teach you to read and write.

Learning Amharic teaches you a modern language. Amharic characters are widely adapted for computer use and even for sending SMS messages on basic cellphones. One expert said that this ancient consonant-vowel combination works very well in computer speech recognition for different languages.