Languages of Eritrea
| Languages of Eritrea | |
|---|---|
| Official languages | Tigrinya, Arabic, English. |
| Main foreign languages | Italian |
| Sign languages | Eritrean Sign Language, older sign languages |
| Common keyboard layouts | |
The main languages spoken in Eritrea are Tigrinya, Tigre and Standard Arabic. Linguistic demography is uncertain due to a lack of reliable official statistics. SIL Ethnologue estimates that there are 2.5 million primary speakers of Tigrinya, and 1.0 million primary speakers of Tigre as of 2006, corresponding to about 50% and 20% of total residents, respectively. The remaining residents primarily speak other languages from the Afro-Asiatic family, with a minority speaking Nilo-Saharan or Indo-European languages.
According to linguists, the first Afro-Asiatic-speaking populations arrived in the region during the Neolithic period from the family's proposed urheimat ("original homeland") in the Nile Valley, or the Near East. Other scholars propose that the Afro-Asiatic family developed in situ in the Horn, with its speakers subsequently dispersing from there.
Eritrea's population today comprises nine ethnic groups, most of whom speak languages from the Semitic and Cushitic branches of the Afro-Asiatic family.
Estimates of numbers of speakers given below are from SIL Ethnologue unless otherwise noted.
The South Semitic (North Ethopic) languages spoken in Eritrea are Tigrinya, Tigre, and Dahlik (formerly considered a dialect of Tigre). Together, they are spoken by around 70% of local residents:
...
Wikipedia