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Endangered Language In Ethiopia

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Introduction
Ethiopia has a lot of languages, 88 different languages in total. Each of these languages are spoken in different places in Ethiopia and have a different amount of people speaking it. The official Ethiopian language is amharic. Not everyone speaks the same language.

There are 4 types of languages spoken in Ethiopia, the semitic languages ( spoken in the central, northern, eastern side of Ethiopia), the Cushitic languages ( central, southern and eastern side of Ethiopia), the Omotic languages (spoken between the southern rift valley and Omo river according to http://www.ethiopiantreasures.co.uk/pages/language.htm), and the nilo-saharan languages ( western side of Ethiopia and at the border of sudan). The difference between semitic …show more content…

According to ogmios.org “every two weeks the last fluent speaker of an endangered languages passes away .... In the next 100 years around half of the worlds languages will be endangered or gone”. Not all lesser spoken languages are endangered. Languages like Wollaytta and Gurage are spoken by around 2 percent (around 1.5 million people) of the population but are still not endangered. The less spoken languages are Wolaytta, Gurage, afar, Hadiyya and gamo. Afar is spoken by around 1.7 percent of the population ( 1.2 million people). Afar is a Cushitic language. Hadiyya is spoken by around 1.7 percent of the population and is also part of the Cushitic family. Gamo is spoken by around 1.5 percent of the population. Gamo is part of the Omotic languages.

Picture from wikipedia.org
This picture shows the percentage of languages spoken in ethiopia. It shows both common and uncommonly spoken languages like amharic and afar.

The most uncommonly spoken languages in Ethiopia are the endangered languages. Endangered languages have less than 10000 speakers and are close to extinction. There are around 22 endangered languages. The second most uncommon of languages spoken are wollaytta (spoken by 2 percent of the population), gurage (spoken by 2 percent), afar (1.7 percent), hadiyya (1.7 percent as well) and gamo (1.5 percent). Not all languages that are spoken by a small amount of the ethiopian population are

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