With 57,500,000 total speakers as of 2019, including around 25,100,000
second language speakers,
Amharic is the most widely spoken of the group, the most widely spoken
language of Ethiopia and second-most widely spoken Semitic language in the world after
Arabic.[3][4]Tigrinya has 7 million speakers and is the most widely spoken language in Eritrea.[5][6] There is a small population of
Tigre speakers in Sudan, and it is the second-most spoken language in Eritrea. The
Ge'ez language has a literary history in its own
Ge'ez script going back to the first century AD. It is no longer spoken but remains the liturgical language of the
Ethiopian and
Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Churches, as well as their respective
Eastern Catholic counterparts.
The "homeland" of the South Semitic languages is widely debated, with some sources, such as A. Murtonen (1967) and Lionel Bender (1997),[7] suggesting an origin in Ethiopia, and others suggesting the southern portion of the
Arabian Peninsula.[8] A study based on a
Bayesian model suggested the latter.[9] This statistical analysis could not estimate when or where the ancestor of all Semitic languages diverged from Afroasiatic but it suggested that the divergence of East, Central, and South Semitic branches occurred in the
Levant.[10] According to many scholars,
Semitic originated from an offshoot of a still earlier language in North Africa, perhaps in the southeastern
Sahara, and
desertification forced its inhabitants to migrate in the fourth millennium BC – some southeast into what is now
Ethiopia, others northeast out of Africa into
Canaan,
Syria and the Mesopotamian valley.[11]
The division of Ethiopic into northern and southern branches was proposed by Cohen (1931) and Hetzron (1972) and garnered broad acceptance, but has been challenged by Rainer Voigt, who concludes that the northern and southern languages are closely related.[12]
^For its membership in North Ethiopic, see Leslau, Wolf (1970). "Ethiopic and South Arabian". Linguistics in South West Asia and North Africa. The Hague. p. 467.{{
cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (
link), and Faber, Alice (2005). "Genetic Subgrouping of the Semitic Languages". The Semitic Languages.
Routledge. pp. 6–7..
Hetzron, Robert (1972). Ethiopian Semitic: studies in classification. Manchester:
Manchester University Press.
Weninger, Stefan. "Vom Altäthiopischen zu den neuäthiopischen Sprachen" [From Old Ethiopian to the New Ethiopian Languages]. In Haspelmath, Martin; König, Ekkehard; Oesterreicher, Wulf; Raible, Wolfgang (eds.). Language Typology and Language Universals (in German). Vol. 2. Berlin:
Walter de Gruyter. pp. 1762–1774.