Tigrinya language

Tigrinya, sometimes romanized according to Italian spelling rules as Tigrigna, is an Ethio-Semitic language, which is a subgrouping within the Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic languages. It is primarily spoken by the Tigrinya and Tigrayan peoples, native to Eritrea and to the Tigray Region of Ethiopia, respectively. It is also spoken by the global diaspora of these regions.

History and literature

Although it differs markedly from the Geʽez language, for instance in having phrasal verbs, and in using a word order that places the main verb last instead of first in the sentence, there is a strong influence of Geʽez on Tigrinya literature, especially with terms relating to Christian life, Biblical names, and so on. Ge'ez, because of its status in Eritrean and Ethiopian culture, and possibly also its simple structure, acted as a literary medium until relatively recent times. Tigrinya is lexically 68% similar to Geʽez, slightly higher than the lexical similarity of Amharic to the ancient language at 62%.
The earliest written example of Tigrinya is a text of local laws found in the district of Logosarda, Debub Region in Southern Eritrea, which dates from the 13th century.
In Eritrea, during British administration, the Ministry of Information put out a weekly newspaper in Tigrinya that cost 5 cents and sold 5,000 copies weekly. At the time, it was reported to be the first of its kind.
Tigrinya was one of Eritrea's official languages during its short-lived federation with Ethiopia. In 1958, it was replaced by the Southern Ethiopic language Amharic prior to Eritrea's annexation. Upon Eritrea's independence in 1991, Tigrinya retained the status of working language in the country. Eritrea was the only state in the world to officially recognize Tigrinya until 2020, when Ethiopia made changes to recognize Tigrinya on a national level.

Speakers

There is no general name for the people who speak Tigrinya. In Eritrea, Tigrinya speakers are officially known as the or Tigrinya people. In Ethiopia, a Tigrayan, that is a native of Tigray, who also speaks the Tigrinya language, is referred to in Tigrinya as , , . Bəher roughly means "nation" in the ethnic sense of the word in Tigrinya, Tigre, Amharic and Ge'ez. The Jeberti in Eritrea also speak Tigrinya.
Tigrinya is the most widely spoken language in Eritrea, and the fourth most spoken language in Ethiopia after Amharic, Oromo, and Somali. It is also spoken by large immigrant communities around the world, in countries including Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Denmark, Germany, Uganda, Italy, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States. In Australia, Tigrinya is one of the languages broadcast on public radio via the multicultural Special Broadcasting Service.
Tigrinya dialects differ phonetically, lexically, and grammatically. No dialect appears to be accepted as a standard. Even though the most spread and used in, for example books, movies and news is the Asmara dialect.

Phonology

For the representation of Tigrinya sounds, this article uses a modification of a system that is common among linguists who work on Ethiopian Semitic languages, but differs somewhat from the conventions of the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Consonant phonemes

Tigrinya has a fairly typical set of phonemes for an Ethiopian Semitic language. That is, there is a set of ejective consonants and the usual seven-vowel system. Unlike many of the modern Ethiopian Semitic languages, Tigrinya has preserved the two pharyngeal consonants which were apparently part of the ancient Geʽez language and which, along with, voiceless velar ejective fricative or voiceless uvular ejective fricative, make it easy to distinguish spoken Tigrinya from related languages such as Amharic, though not from Tigre, which has also maintained the pharyngeal consonants.
The charts below show the phonemes of Tigrinya. The sounds are shown using the same system for representing the sounds as in the rest of the article. When the IPA symbol is different, the orthography is indicated in brackets.

Vowel phonemes

The sounds are shown using the same system for representing the sounds as in the rest of the article. When the IPA symbol is different, the orthography is indicated in brackets.

	Front	Central	Back
Close
Mid
Open

Gemination

, the doubling of a consonantal sound, is meaningful in Tigrinya, i.e. it affects the meaning of words. While gemination plays an important role in the morphology of the Tigrinya verb, it is normally accompanied by other marks. But there is a small number of pairs of words which are only differentiable from each other by gemination, e.g., ;,. All consonants, with the exception of the pharyngeal and glottal ones, can be geminated.

Allophones

The velar consonants and are pronounced differently when they appear immediately after a vowel and are not geminated. In these circumstances, is pronounced as a velar fricative. is pronounced as a fricative, or sometimes as an affricate. This fricative or affricate is more often pronounced further back, in the uvular place of articulation. All of these possible realizations – velar ejective fricative, uvular ejective fricative, velar ejective affricate and uvular ejective affricate – are cross-linguistically very rare sounds.
Since these two sounds are completely conditioned by their environments, they can be considered allophones of and. This is especially clear from verb roots in which one consonant is realized as one or the other allophone depending on what precedes it. For example, for the verb meaning, which has the triconsonantal root √b-k-y, there are forms such as ምብካይ and በኸየ , and for the verb meaning, which has the triconsonantal root √s-r-kʼ, there are forms such as ይሰርቁ and ይሰርቕ .
What is especially interesting about these pairs of phones is that they are distinguished in Tigrinya orthography. Because allophones are completely predictable, it is quite unusual for them to be represented with distinct symbols in the written form of a language.

Syllables

A Tigrinya syllable may consist of a consonant-vowel or a consonant-vowel-consonant sequence. When three consonants come together within a word, the cluster is broken up with the introduction of an epenthetic vowel, and when two consonants would otherwise end a word, the vowel appears after them, or is introduced before the suffix.
For example,
Stress is neither contrastive nor particularly salient in Tigrinya. It seems to depend on gemination, but it has apparently not been systematically investigated.

Grammar

Typical grammatical features

Grammatically, Tigrinya is a typical Ethiopian Semitic language in most ways:

A Tigrinya noun is treated as either masculine or feminine. However, most inanimate nouns do not have a fixed gender.
Tigrinya nouns have plural, as well as singular, forms, though the plural is not obligatory when the linguistic or pragmatic context makes the number clear. As in Tigre and Geez, noun plurals may be formed through internal changes as well as through the addition of suffixes. For example, ፈረስ , ኣፍራሰ .
Adjectives behave in most ways like nouns. Most Tigrinya adjectives, like those in Tigre and Ge'ez, have feminine and plural forms. For example, ጽቡቕ , ጽብቕቲ , ጽቡቓት
Within personal pronouns and subject agreement inflections on verbs, gender is distinguished in second person as well as third. For example, ተዛረብ , ተዛረቢ .
Possessive adjectives take the form of noun suffixes: ገዛ , ገዛይ , ገዛኺ .
Verbs are based on consonantal roots, most consisting of three consonants: √sbr, ሰበረ , ይሰብር , ምስባር .
Within the tense system there is a basic distinction between the perfective form—conjugated with suffixes and denoting the past—and the imperfective form—conjugated with prefixes and in some cases suffixes—and denoting the present or future: ሰበሩ , ይሰብሩ .
As in Ge'ez and Amharic, there is also a separate "gerundive" form of the verb, conjugated with suffixes and used to link verbs within a sentence: ገዲፍካ ተዛረብ .
Verbs also have a separate jussive/imperative form, similar to the imperfective: ይስበሩ .
Through the addition of derivational morphology, verbs may be made passive, reflexive, causative, frequentative, reciprocal, or reciprocal causative: ፈለጡ fäläṭ-u 'they knew', ተፈልጡ tä-fälṭ-u 'they were known', ኣፈልጡ a-fälṭ-u 'they caused to know ', ተፋለጡ tä-faläṭ-u 'they knew each other', ኣፋለጡ a-f-faläṭ-u 'they caused to know each other'.
Verbs may take direct object and prepositional pronoun suffixes: ፈለጠኒ fäläṭä-nni 'he knew me', ፈለጠለይ fäläṭä-lläy 'he knew for me'.
Negation is expressed through the prefix ay- and, in independent clauses, the suffix -n: ኣይፈለጠን ay-fäläṭä-n 'he didn't know'.
The copula and the verb of existence in the present are irregular: ኣሎ allo 'there is, he exists', እዩ ǝyyu 'he is', የለን or የልቦን yällän or yälbon 'there isn't, he doesn't exist', ኣይኰነን aykʷänän 'he isn't, it isn't', ነበረ näbärä 'he existed, he was, there was', ይኸውን yǝ-ḵäwwǝn 'he will be', ይነብር yǝ-näbbǝr 'he will exist, there will be'.
The verb of existence together with object suffixes for the possessor expresses possession and obligation : ኣሎኒ allo-nni 'I have, I must' me').
Relative clauses are expressed by a prefix attached to the verb: ዝፈለጠ zǝ-fäläṭä 'who knew'
Cleft sentences, with relative clauses normally following the copula, are very common: መን እዩ ዝፈለጠ män ǝyyu zǝ-fäläṭä 'who knew?'.
There is an accusative marker used on definite direct objects. In Tigrinya this is the prefix nǝ-. For example, ሓጐስ ንኣልማዝ ረኺቡዋ ḥagʷäs nǝ’almaz räḵibuwwa 'Hagos met Almaz'.
As in other modern Ethiopian Semitic languages, the default word order in clauses is subject–object–verb, and noun modifiers usually precede their head nouns.