Amharic Alphabet & Letters

Amharic is written in fidel (ፊደል, "letter"), the Ge'ez or Ethiopic script. It is an abugida: every letter is a consonant with a vowel built in, and each consonant comes in seven forms, called orders. The first order, ግዕዝ, carries ä; the others add u, i, a, e, ə and o by a small stroke, ring or change of leg: ለ lä, ሉ lu, ሊ li, ላ la, ሌ le, ል lə, ሎ lo. The orders are named with the Ge'ez ordinals ግዕዝ, ካዕብ, ሣልስ, ራብዕ, ኃምስ, ሳድስ and ሳብዕ, first to seventh.

The sixth order does double duty: it is the consonant with a short ə, or the consonant with no vowel at all. ሰላም (selam, peace and hello) is ሰ sä + ላ la + ም m, and the name of the language, አማርኛ (amarəñña), ends in the sixth-order ር and the fourth-order ኛ.

The grid above has 34 consonants in the traditional order, which starts ሀ ለ ሐ መ (h, l, ḥ, m), not with A B C. Seven of them were added to Ge'ez letters for Amharic sounds, each by an extra stroke on an older letter: ሸ sh from ሰ, ቸ ch from ተ, ኘ ny from ነ, ዠ zh from ዘ, ጀ j from ደ, ጨ ch' from ጠ, and ኸ from ከ. ቨ v is a later addition for foreign words such as ቪዛ (visa). Children learn the rows by chanting them, ሀ ሁ ሂ ሃ ሄ ህ ሆ, which is why a fidel primer is often just called ሀሁ.

Amharic letters that sound the same, and the w-forms

Fidel was made for Ge'ez, which had more throat and hissing sounds than Amharic, so modern Amharic reads several letters alike: ሀ ሐ ኀ (and ኸ) are all h, ሰ and ሠ are both s, አ and ዐ both a glottal stop, ጸ and ፀ both ts'. Words keep their traditional letter, so a careful writer spells ዓመት (amet, year) with ዓ, ሥራ (sira, work) with ሥ, ኃይል (hayl, power) with ኃ and ፀሐይ (sun) with ፀ and ሐ; Haile Selassie's name is written ኃይለ ሥላሴ. In everyday writing the plainer ሀ, ሰ, አ and ጸ often stand in, and dictionaries list the variants side by side. With the h and glottal letters the first and fourth forms also sound alike: ሀ and ሃ are both ha, አ and ኣ both a.

The wa column holds the labialized letters, a consonant followed by a w sound and written with a small extra stroke: ሏ lwa, ሟ mwa, ቧ bwa, ጧ t'wa, as in ጧት (t'wat, morning). Four consonants, ቀ ኀ ከ ገ, have a whole set of five w-forms, ቈ ቊ ቋ ቌ ቍ and so on, because qw, kw and gw are common sounds: ቋንቋ (qwanqwa, language) and ጓደኛ (gwadäñña, friend) use them. The odd one in the አ row, ኧ, is the vowel ä on its own, as in the exclamation ኧረ (äre, oh come on).

Fidel does not show doubled consonants, and that matters in Amharic: ዋና can be wana, swimming, or wanna, main. Readers tell the words apart from context, the way English readers tell apart read and read.

Amharic punctuation and Ge'ez numbers ። ፣ ፩

Amharic ends a sentence with ።, four dots in a square called አራት ነጥብ (arat net'ib, four dots), not with a single full stop. ፣ is the comma and ፤ the semicolon. The two dots ፡ once separated every word in manuscripts and inscriptions; modern text uses a space, and ፡ survives in titles, on signs and in a traditional style of writing. ፦ introduces speech or a list. There is an Ethiopic question mark ፧, but most people simply type ?, and ! for exclamations. Quotations are often set in « ».

The Ge'ez numbers are ፩ ፪ ፫ ፬ ፭ ፮ ፯ ፰ ፱ for 1 to 9, ፲ ፳ ፴ ፵ ፶ ፷ ፸ ፹ ፺ for the tens, ፻ for 100 and ፼ for 10,000. They come from Greek letters and have no zero, so numbers are said and written in parts: 11 is ፲፩ (ten one), 100 is ፻, 2019 is ፳፻፲፱ (twenty hundreds, nineteen). Everyday Amharic uses 1 2 3 for prices, phone numbers and maths; Ge'ez numbers appear in church books, on calendars and dates of the Ethiopian year, in chapter numbers and on formal documents.

How to type Amharic on an English keyboard or phone

Windows 10 and 11 have a built-in Amharic input method: add Amharic in Settings under Time & language, then switch keyboards with Windows + Space. It is phonetic: you type the consonant and then the vowel on an ordinary English keyboard, so s + e gives ሰ, s + u ሱ, and the consonant alone gives the sixth form, s ስ; typing s e l a m gives ሰላም. Keyman, which also runs on a Mac, and Power Geez are alternatives.

Phones: Gboard supports Amharic on Android; Google's current iPhone/iPad language list does not include it. Copying from this page works everywhere: tap a letter, then paste.

Everything here is real Unicode text (the Ethiopic block, U+1200 to U+137F), which is why it pastes into any app. Older Ethiopic fonts from before Unicode stored fidel in place of Latin letters, so text typed in them turns into nonsense when the font changes; that is the usual cause of "Amharic font" trouble. Fonts that show fidel well include Nyala and Ebrima on Windows, Noto Sans Ethiopic and Abyssinica SIL. In HTML, write a letter by its number, e.g. ሀ for ሀ.

Where Amharic is spoken

Amharic is a Semitic language, related to Arabic and Hebrew, and the most spoken Semitic language after Arabic. CLDR estimates around 39 million speakers, nearly all of them in Ethiopia 🇪🇹, where it is a working language of the federal government, the language of Addis Ababa and of the Amhara region, and the common language between speakers of Oromo, Tigrinya, Somali and Ethiopia's many other languages; many millions more speak it as a second language.

Israel 🇮🇱 has about 55,000 speakers in CLDR's estimate; the United States has a larger Amharic-speaking community, with 239,933 people aged 5 and older speaking Amharic at home across U.S. metropolitan areas in the 2020–2024 ACS. The Israeli community includes Ethiopian Jews (Beta Israel) who came in the 1980s and 1990s, many on the airlifts Operation Moses and Operation Solomon. Large communities also live in Canada, Europe and the Gulf states.

The same fidel writes Tigrinya, Ge'ez and other languages of Ethiopia and Eritrea, each with a few letters of its own; see the Tigrinya collection for its alphabet and the Ethiopia collection for the flag, the birr and Ethiopian emoji. The birr has no currency sign: prices are written 100 ብር, Br or ETB. Hebrew and Arabic, Amharic's Semitic relatives, have collections of their own too.