African language

አማርኛ (Amharic)

Ethiopia's official language, in its own script

Amharic is a Semitic language — in the same family as Arabic and Hebrew — and the official working language of Ethiopia, spoken by tens of millions of people as a first or second language. It's the second most-spoken Semitic language in the world after Arabic, and it carries its own writing system rather than borrowing Latin or Arabic script.

FamilyAfroasiatic, Semitic branch
Spoken inEthiopia, plus significant diaspora communities in North America, Europe, and the Middle East
SpeakersTens of millions of speakers, as both a first and second language

Writing system

What counts as correct

Amharic is written in the Ge'ez script (also called Fidel), an abugida where each character represents a consonant-vowel pair rather than a single letter — closer in concept to Chinese characters than to the Latin alphabet in how much a single mistaken glyph can change. Getting the right character, in the right order within the syllabary, is what makes Amharic text legible rather than garbled.

Why it matters

Precision, not approximation

Because Ge'ez characters carry both consonant and vowel information at once, a wrong glyph isn't a typo — it's a different sound entirely. Itumo checks that every character in an Amharic translation is the correct one for its position, not just visually similar.

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Pair አማርኛ with any of Itumo's other languages — including direct African-to-African translation.

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