Amharic
Amharic is the national language of Ethiopia and is spoken by around 12 million people as their mother-tongue and by many more as a second language. Though only one of seventy or so languages spoken in Ethiopia, Amharic has been the language of the court and the dominant population group in Highland Ethiopia since at least the late 13th century and remains the official language of Ethiopia today.
It belongs to the Semitic family of languages and as such is related to Arabic and Hebrew. However, whilst many of the grammatical forms are reminiscent of the latter languages, the sentence structure (syntax) of Amharic is very different and has more in common with the non-Semitic languages of Ethiopia.
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