Tigre Alphabet & Letters

Tigre (ትግሬ, also called ትግራይት, Tigrayit) is written in the Ge'ez script, the fidel (ፊደል) also used for Tigrinya and Amharic. It is an abugida: each letter is a consonant with a vowel built in, and each consonant has seven forms, changed by a small stroke, ring or bent leg. The first form carries ä, the others u, i, a, e, ə and o: ለ lä, ሉ lu, ሊ li, ላ la, ሌ le, ል lə, ሎ lo. The grid above keeps the traditional order, which begins ሀ ለ ሐ መ (h, l, ḥ, m) rather than A B C.

The sixth form does two jobs: it is the consonant with a short ə, or the consonant with no vowel at all. So ሰላም (salam, peace, the greeting heard all over Eritrea) is ሰ + ላ + ም, with ም standing for a bare m, and the name ትግሬ itself starts with two sixth forms, ት and ግ, before ሬ.

After the seven vowel columns comes the wa column: a consonant followed by a w sound, written with a small extra stroke, as in ሏ lwa or ጓ gwa. Three consonants, ቀ ከ ገ (k', k and g), have a whole labialized set, ቈ ቊ ቋ ቌ ቍ, ኰ ኲ ኳ ኴ ኵ and ጐ ጒ ጓ ጔ ጕ, for the qw, kw and gw sounds that run through the Ethiopian Semitic languages.

Tigre letters for sounds English does not have: ሐ, ዐ, ቀ, ጠ, ጸ

Tigre keeps the two throat consonants that Amharic lost. ሐ is ḥ, a voiceless pharyngeal fricative, different from plain ሀ; ዐ is ʿ, the voiced throat sound Arabic writes ع, different from the glottal stop አ. In Tigre they keep words apart, so a writer has to pick the right one; ዓ in ሰላም ዓለይኩም (salam ʿaleykum) is that ʿ.

Five letters are ejectives, consonants spoken with a little pop from a closed throat, usually written with an apostrophe in Latin letters: ቀ k' (often written q), ጠ t', ጨ ch', ጸ ts' and ጰ p', the last mostly in borrowed words. ፐ p is rare too, since Semitic p turned into f long ago.

This collection keeps to the letters Tigre needs. The Unicode fidel also holds ሠ, ኀ and ፀ, Ge'ez letters for sounds that later merged with ሰ, ሐ and ጸ; ቐ and ኸ, the k' and x of Tigrinya; ቨ for v in foreign words; and whole extra series made for Gurage, Bench and other languages of Ethiopia. They are in the Amharic and Tigrinya collections and in the Ethiopic pages of the site.

Like the other Ethiopic languages, Tigre does not mark doubled consonants in ordinary writing, although doubling changes meaning. Unicode has a gemination mark ፟ (U+135F) that sits on a letter to show it, but it appears mainly in dictionaries and teaching material.

Tigre vs Tigrinya, and where Tigre is spoken 🇪🇷

The names confuse almost everyone. Tigrinya (ትግርኛ) is the language of the Eritrean highlands and of Tigray in Ethiopia, with about 11 million speakers by CLDR estimates. Tigre is a separate language, spoken in the north and west of Eritrea 🇪🇷: the hills around Keren, the Sahel and Barka lowlands and the Red Sea coast around Massawa. CLDR estimates about 1.1 million speakers, making it Eritrea's second-largest indigenous language after Tigrinya, and Tigre communities also live across the border in eastern Sudan.

Tigre and Tigrinya are close cousins: both descend from the same branch of Semitic as Ge'ez, the old literary and church language of Ethiopia and Eritrea, and they share many words, but a speaker of one does not simply understand the other. Arabic, Hebrew and Amharic are more distant relatives in the same family. Tigre's neighbours in Eritrea include Saho, Afar, Beja (Hedareb) and Bilen, and most Tigre speakers are Muslim, so Arabic is widely known as the language of religion.

Eritrea has no single official language; the languages of its nine peoples are treated as equals, and children start school in their mother tongue. Tigre is used in Eritrean primary schools, written in fidel, and heard on Eritrean radio and television. For the flag, the camel 🐪 and the coffee ceremony ☕ see the Eritrea collection.

Ethiopic punctuation and Ge'ez numbers in Tigre ። ፣ ፩

Tigre ends a sentence with ።, four dots in a square, and uses ፣ as the comma and ፤ as the semicolon. The two dots ፡ once separated every word; today a space does that, and ፡ appears in headings, on signs and in a more traditional style. ፦ introduces speech or a list. There is an Ethiopic question mark ፧, but most people type ? and !, and quotations often go 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. There is no zero and no place value, so numbers are built from parts: 11 is ፲፩, 2026 is ፳፻፳፮ (twenty hundreds, twenty, six). Tigre writing uses ordinary 1 2 3 for prices, phone numbers and maths; Ge'ez numbers turn up in dates, chapter numbers and formal headings.

How to type the Tigre alphabet on a computer or phone

Tigre is written in the Ethiopic script, whose characters are encoded in the Ethiopic block (U+1200 to U+137F); Tigrinya and Amharic use the same script. Keyman (Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iPhone) has free phonetic Ge'ez keyboards: you type a consonant and then its vowel on an English layout, so s + e gives ሰ, s + u gives ሱ, and s alone gives ስ. The Amharic input method built into Windows 10 and 11 works the same way and covers the main Ge'ez letters; for the rarer ones, such as the labialized sets, copying from this page is the surest way.

On a phone, Gboard's Amharic keyboard or a Ge'ez keyboard app gives the fidel; most let you enter a consonant and then choose its vowel form. For a word or two the quickest way is to copy from this page: tap a letter in the symbol grid and paste it before copying the next one. In HTML any letter can be written as a numeric reference, for example ሰ for ሰ and ። for ።. If letters show as empty boxes, install a font with Ethiopic, such as Noto Sans Ethiopic or Abyssinica SIL.