Tigrinya

About Tigrinya

Tigrinya is spoken by about 7.5 million people in Eritrea, where it is the most widely spoken language and one of the main working languages, and in the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia. Like Amharic, it is a Semitic language that descends from the same ancestor as Ge'ez, the old liturgical language of the region.

Tigrinya is written in the Ge'ez script, in which each symbol stands for a consonant and vowel together. The guides add a spelling in Latin letters, and these spellings are not standardized, so the same word may appear in several forms.

FamilyAfroasiatic, Semitic, Ethiopian Semitic
Native speakersabout 7.5 million (2019)
Where spokenEritrea, Ethiopia (Tigray)
ScriptGe'ez script
Codesti (ISO 639-1), tir (ISO 639-3)

Speaker number: Ethnologue (2019), via Wikidata. Retrieved 26 September 2026.

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