Help:IPA for Amharic

The Amharic letters (ፊደላት) in the second chart have the consonants in rows and the vowels in columns. Each letter represents one consonant (or consonant cluster) and one vowel. There are seven written vowels in Amharic with each vowel altering the form of a consonant. All of the consonant-vowel combinations in the first column are called first orders, the ones in the second column are second orders, and so on. The first order is identical to the letters used in the original Ge'ez before the vocalizations were created centuries ago. The other six orders are alterations of the original Ge'ez letters. Each vowel order alters the Ge'ez letters in a similar way. Though there are many irregularities, the letters of the same order resemble one another in at least one aspect, the aspect that characterized the order.

Although the Amharic script can form simple syllables with one letter, it may take multiple letters to form one complex syllable. The complex syllables are formed using the sixth order, which serves the purposes of being a vowel carrier and of marking a mute consonant (without a vowel). For example, the Amharic word for "name", ስም, is one syllable but uses two letters. Although it is pronounced as /sɨm/ it could also be read as /'sɨ.mɨ/. There is no way to distinguish the sixth order's functions in written Amharic.

In the charts below, there are certain rows written in grey to indicate that such letters are of the same phonetic value as the previous row written in black. There are multiple ways to write some letters in Amharic as some of the sounds that were once used in Ge'ez are non-existent in modern Amharic. At the cost of redundancy, Amharic speakers retain the archaic letters in their orthography to preserve the Ge'ez origins of many of their words. Also, the English approximations are sometimes very rough, and they give only a general idea of the pronunciation.

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