English is the most widely spoken foreign language and is the medium of instruction in secondary schools and universities. Amharic was the language of primary school instruction, but has been replaced in many areas by local languages such as Oromifa and Tigrinya. After the fall of the Derg regime in 1991, the new constitution of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia granted all ethnic groups the right to develop their languages and to establish mother tongue primary education systems. This is a marked change to the language policies of previous governments in Ethiopia.
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Ethiopia has many indigenous languages (some 84 according to the Ethnologue, 77 according to the 1994 census), most of them Afro-Asiatic (Semitic, Cushitic, Omotic), as well as some that are Nilo-Saharan.Charles Ferguson proposed the Ethiopian Language Area,
characterized by shared grammatical and phonological features (1976). This language area includes the Afro-Asiatic languages of Ethiopia, not the Nilo-Saharan languages. More recently, Mauro Tosco has questioned the validity of Ferguson's original proposal (2000). There is still no unanimity among scholars on this point, but Tosco has at least weakened Ferguson's original claim.
Last modified on Thursday, 14 October 2010 13:19
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