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Amharic Alphabet (Ethiopic)

The letters and characters of Amharic written in the Ethiopic script, in order — every standard character with its name and codepoint, the additional and punctuation sets, and exactly how many fonts include them. About 39,176,975 people read or write it across 2 countries.

Standard characters

The minimal set of characters required for Amharic — the language's alphabet, in its traditional order. Tap a character to copy it; each name opens the full character page.

How the Amharic fidäl works

Amharic is written in the Ethiopic script — the fidäl — from left to right. It is an abugida: nothing here is a bare consonant or a bare vowel. Each of the 282 signs is a whole syllable, a consonant already married to a vowel. The signs fall into families of about seven — one family per consonant, its members called the orders. The first order ends in a short uh (ä), and the rest follow in a fixed procession: u, i, a, e, a bare or near-silent ə, and o. So ሀ ሁ ሂ ሃ ሄ ህ ሆ reads hä, hu, hi, ha, he, hə, ho, and every family works the same way once you learn its first sign. Some families add a second branch of signs with a w folded in — the labialized forms like ቈ (qʷä).

The sixth order is the overworked one: besides its own faint vowel it also serves as the plain consonant with no vowel at all, which is how Amharic writes consonant pairs and word endings. Several families in the chart are antiques kept from Ge'ez, the classical language the script was made for. ሐ, ኀ and ኸ were once throaty sounds distinct from ሀ; modern Amharic reads all four as plain h. ሠ has merged into ሰ (s), ዐ into አ, and ፀ into ጸ. The chart notes each merger at the row it touches.

The sounds English lacks are the ejectives, and Amharic is built on them — four or five consonants made by snapping the throat shut and bursting the sound out in a pop, written here t', ch', p', ts' and q. They pair against ordinary t, ch, p and ts, and the difference makes words distinct. Against that difficulty, the script has one mercy: what you see is what you say. There are no silent letters and no alternative spellings to choose between — the fidäl writes every sound once, exactly as it is pronounced.

Punctuation characters

The marks used to separate sentences and to clarify meaning.

Where Amharic (Ethiopic) is read

Countries shaded by the share of their population that reads or writes Amharic in the Ethiopic script. The map is zoomed to the region where at least 1% of a country's people read it; neighbouring countries are shown unshaded for context.