Language Diversity Challenge: Languages of Africa | 2/7 | Tigrinya (tɪˈɡɹiːnjə)
[image description: An image of some text written in Tigrinya posted by Language-Museum.]
What is the language called in English and the language itself? – The language is called Tigrinya in English and in the langauge itself. In Tigrinya script, it is written as ትግርኛ. It may also be called Tigrigna, Tigray, or Tigriññā. It has 2 main dialects: Asmara (Eritrea) and Tigray (Ethiopia).
Where is the language spoken? – Tigrinya is the official language of Eritrea, and it is a minority langauge in Ethiopia, specifically Tigray.
How many people speak the language? – According to wikipedia, there are 9,730,000 speakers of Tigrinya as of 2018.
Which language family does it belong to? What are some of its relative languages? – Tigrinya is considered as Afro-Asiatic > South Semitic > North Ethiopic > Tigrinya, and it’s closest relative langauges are Tigre and Dahalik. Other relatively close langauges are Amharic, Argobba, Harari, East Gurage, Soddo, and, Muher.
What writing system does the language use? – Tigrinya is written in a modified Ge’ez script which is shown in the pictures below.
It has it’s own numerical system, too!
What kind of grammatical features does the language have? – Tigrinya is an SOV language with 2 genders, 2 numbers, definite articles, 4 moods, 2 voices (active and passive), and tense / aspect system. I do not know how to accurately talk about the persons / pronouns system in linguistic terms, but please look at the image below.
What does the language sound like?
What do you personally find interesting about the language? – I found it interesting that “[nouns are] treated as either masculine or feminine. However, most inanimate nouns do not have a fixed gender.” I understand how that makes sense, and it even seems practical. This is just the first time that I’m seeing noun gender as, well, strict and not strict at the same time. I’ll give it to Tigrinya, it’s going on my list of “languages with interesting gender rules” right next to Lithuanian. Congrats.
Extra: – here is spoken Tigrinya – learning resources: memrise 1 2, 50languages, tigrinya.com, ucl.ac.uk, people.vcu.edu, Learnthetigrinyalanguage (Facebook group); pay resources: cudoo, utalk – on another note: I’m sorry this post has so many photos;;
So my friend let me help you here a bit considering I am familiar with the language linguistically and am a speaker myself.
Tigrinya has two major dialect groupings, Northern and Southern, with a handful of dialects that are transitional between the two. You can usually gauge the grouping a dialect belongs to by where speakers weaken the velar stop [k]. Geographically the Northern dialect grouping starts within Ethiopia, around Adwa and extends northwards while the Southern dialects tend to be concentrated south of Mek’elle—I myself speak a Northern dialect and hence my speech is more similar to that of Eritreans; then again the idea that we speak differently is nationalistic, it’s not rooted objectively in anything observable and I wouldn’t think it would be helpful for us right now considering what is happening in Ethiopia. The idea itself is used to further push a narrative that has always been used to further divide us from Tigrinya-speaking Eritreans on grounds that aren’t exactly founded in a reality that isn’t based in nationalism.
Also in regards to classification I would like to add that “South Semitic” is not a thing! I know that a lot of internet sources aren’t the most helpful in this regard but the justification for the grouping is based around some archaisms retained in the South Arabian languages and the Afrosemitic languages such as Tigrinya—Tigrinya in specific is the only language considered to be a viable descendant of Ge‘ez and a lot of lexical items are nearly identical hence why if you can speak Tigrinya, learning Ge‘ez is a breeze to a degree.
You may find this interesting but some letters of the Fidäl variant we use are also redundant, as it seems your chart shows, such as ሥ and ፅ—the latter is because of a sound merger that led to the sound no longer being present outside of allophones in Tigrinya (the script does innovate letters for allophones) and the former is a mystery to a degree being the likely reconstructed sound for its value in Ge‘ez is still present in Tigrinya.
