South Ethiopian Semitic languages
| Ethiopian Semitic | |
|---|---|
| Geographic distribution |
Eritrea, Ethiopia |
| Linguistic classification |
Afro-Asiatic
|
| Subdivisions |
|
| Glottolog | ethi1244 |
Ethiopian Semitic (also known as Ethiosemitic or Ethiopic, or in the past by a few linguists as Abyssinian due to geography) is a language group which forms the Western branch of the South Semitic languages. Several Ethiopian Semitic languages are spoken in Eritrea and Ethiopia, with a small population of Tigre language speakers in Sudan. Amharic, the official working language in Ethiopia, has 36 million speakers and is the most widely spoken in the group. Tigrinya has 7 million speakers and is the most widely spoken language in Eritrea. However, this usage is not widespread.
The division into Northern and Southern branches was established by Cohen (1931) and Hetzron (1972) and garnered broad acceptance, but this classification has recently been challenged by Voigt.
While focused on Semitic languages as the only branch of the broader Afroasiatic languages that is also today distributed outside Africa, a recent study by Kitchen et al. proposed through the use of Bayesian computational phylogenetic techniques that "contemporary Ethiosemitic languages of Africa reflect a single introduction of early Ethiosemitic from southern Arabia approximately 2800 years ago", and that this single introduction of Ethiosemitic underwent "rapid diversification" within Eritrea and Ethiopia.
The Ethiopian Semitic languages all share subject–object–verb (SOV) word order as part of the Ethiopian language area.
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