- Also spoken in
- Eritrea, Ethiopia
- Script
- Ethiopic
Where it's spoken
Tigrinya is an Ethio-Semitic language spoken in Eritrea and Ethiopia, mostly in the Tigray area but also in northern and central regions of Eritrea. Eritrea's constitution guarantees the equality of all Eritrean languages, and one scholarly overview notes that it gives no specific official status to any of the languages spoken in the country. The same overview reports that in practice Tigrinya, Arabic and English were used as working languages of the government, and that Tigrinya became the most dominant language in most societal domains. In Ethiopia, the constitution of the Federal State of Tigray states that Tigrinya (spelled "Tigregna" there) is the working language of that state.
Sources
- Constitution of Eritrea (1997), Constitute Project — Article 4(3)
- Asfaha, Yonas Mesfun; Kroon, Sjaak (2024). "Language Policies and Practices in Eritrea." In Lisanza & Muaka (eds), The Palgrave Handbook of Language Policies in Africa, pp. 465-488. Palgrave Macmillan
- Franck, Julie; Papadopoulou, Despina (2022). "L2 French learning by Eritrean refugee speakers of Tigrinya." Bilingualism: Language and Cognition — §1.1 Aspects of Tigrinya grammar
- The Constitution of the Federal State of Tigray (1995) — Article 5, Language
Script & pronunciation
Tigrinya is written in the Ge'ez (Ethiopic) syllabary. In that script, the syllables are traditionally presented as a two-dimensional matrix of consonant-vowel combinations, so each sign stands for a consonant together with a vowel. The traditional word separator of the script is its own character, although a plain space is becoming common in modern use. This app's phrase cards give the Ge'ez text together with a Latin-letter transliteration in the romanization field, as in ሰላም (Selam, "Hello").
Sources
Grammar essentials
Tigrinya is a verb-final language: all non-pronominal complements precede the main verb. This app's card ስጋ ኣይበልዕን እየ (Sega aybel'in iye, "I don't eat meat") puts the object ስጋ before the verb ኣይበልዕን. In that card, the verb is negated with a prefix ኣይ together with a suffix ን, which is the ay-…-n pattern described for Tigrinya verbs. The gender of the subject is marked on the verb by distinct masculine and feminine affixes, but only for second and third person. In the independent subject pronouns of Mainstream Tigrinya, "you" has separate forms for a man, a woman, several men and several women. This app's card ከመይ ኣለኻ? (Kemey alekha?, "How are you?") gives the form used when speaking to a man, and its usage note lists the different forms for a woman and for several people.
Sources
- Franck, Julie; Papadopoulou, Despina (2022). "L2 French learning by Eritrean refugee speakers of Tigrinya." Bilingualism: Language and Cognition — §1.1 Aspects of Tigrinya grammar
- Gasser, Michael (2009). "Semitic Morphological Analysis and Generation Using Finite State Transducers with Feature Structures." Proceedings of EACL 2009 — §2 Tigrinya Verb Morphology
- Niguss Weldezgu Mehari (2021). "A Grammar of Rayya Tigrinya." PhD dissertation, Addis Ababa University — Table 6, Subject pronoun forms