Learn Tigrinya
Tigrinya, also spelt Tigrigna, is spoken in Ethiopia as an official working language and in Eritrea as the national language. There is also a large Tigrinya speaking population in Israel, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and other countries. It is closely related to Amharic, spoken in Ethiopia, and Tigre, spoken in Eritrea, and is distantly related to other Semitic languages such as Arabic and Hebrew. Tigrinya is written in the Ge’ez script, in which each symbol represents both a consonant and a vowel.
Learn Tigrinya with uTalk
Where is it spoken?
Ethiopia
Eritrea
Number of speakers
9,000,000
Language family
Afro-Asiatic
Semitic
Ethiopic
Fun facts about Tigrinya
The language borrows a lot of words from other languages including 'pasta' and 'makina' - car - from Italian and 'komputer' and 'radio' from English.
Pronunciation of Tigrinya is very straightforward and experts say 'you write as you read it and you read as you write it'.
Punctuation marks may look unfamiliar- a full stop is ። and a comma is ፣
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