Learn Amhar Online

Ethiopia has never been colonized. It has its own time bill, its own calendar and a font older than the Latin alphabet. The centre of this civilization is Amharic, the language of the emperors, the Orthodox Church and the highland trade for almost a millennium.
About 60 million people speak Amhar today, of which 30 million as a native language. It is the second largest semitic language in the world to Arabic and thus distant related to Hebrew.

Amharic is the official language of Ethiopia, language of government, trade and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Even the Rastafari movement in Jamaica consider Amharic as sacred.

At Sankofa Lingua Academy, you learn Amharisch from the ground and dive into a language that lasted thousands of years.

Amharically belongs to the African-Asian language family, more precisely to south Ethiopian branch. In the first millennium before Christ, when the Greeks founded their first city states in Europe, semitic spokesmen from South Arabia crossed the Red Sea and settled in the Ethiopian Highlands. The Agaw and other kuschitic people lived there for millennia.
What followed was not a conquest, but a century of exchange. The language of the newcomers took up African structures, changed, became something new. Linguists call this Process Cuddingthe transformation of semitic structures through kuschiliche influencesas Oromo, Somali or Afar. Amharic is the result, a semitic language with African foundation.

In 1270 the turning point came. Ethiopia was then a patchy carpet of kingdoms and peoples, Christians and Muslims, highland farmers and nomads. King Yäkuno Amlak united these areas under Salomon Dynasty. The ruler line traced the biblical connection between King Solomon and the Queen of Saba, held in the Nationalepos Kebra Nagast, the "Glanz of Kings". In this diverse kingdom one needed a common language. Amharic became this band. You called it Lisane Negus, the king's language. From that moment on, Amharisch was more than a dialect. It was the tool that Ethiopia entered.

Arabic and Hebrew are written from right to left. Amharic not. It is only semitic language running from left to right, just like German or English. The reason is in history. While the Roman Empire collapsed in the 4th century, the kingdom of Aksum flourished in the Horn of Africa. Aksumitian merchants sailed to Egypt, Greek monks came to the highlands. This exchange with the Greek and Coptic world shaped the font.

The Scripture itself is called Fidäl and is based on the ancient Ge'ez, one of Africa's oldest writings, developed in the 5th century BC. Fidäl looks like no other writing of the world. The principle is simple, but unusual. There are 33 basic signs for the consonants, and each character has seven variants, depending on which vowel follows. 

It is interesting that Amharic has been spoken at the court of the Solomonian emperors since 1270, but no one has written it. For official documents, chronicles and religious texts one used Ge'ez, the old church language. Ge'ez was the language of the priests and scholars, Amharic the language of the people. That changed only in the 19th century. Emperor Tewodros II. wanted to modernise Ethiopia and make a united state from fragmentation in regional princess. Part of this project was the language. He left his official chronicles for the first time in Amharisch write. A symbolic break with tradition.

The amharic language has a tradition that there is no European language. Her name Säm-ənna-Wärq, translated ‘Wax and gold". The picture comes from goldsmith's art. When Ethiopian craftsmen produce jewelry, they first form a model of wax. Then they pour in gold and melt out the wax. What remains is the valuable inside.