Amharic was made the “official language” of Ethiopia by Emperor Haile Selassie. The language is now used by the government to carry out official business. However, only 25 million of Ethiopia’s 120 million population speak Amharic as their native tongue. Afaan Oromo is the most common language, spoken by 30 million plus people, but the country has over eighty languages and many dialects.
Despite this diversity, Amharic has long had the official backing of the state. Elevating Amharic while denigrating other languages has been a pillar of Amhara/Abyssinian nationalism for well over a hundred years, since at least Menelik II (1889-1913). Amharic was dubbed ልሳነ ንጉሥ (lesane negus – the king’s language), and has been implicitly associated with Ethiopian-ness.
The core of historical Abyssinia are the Tigray and Amhara regions currently at loggerheads with each other. Emperor Yohannes IV (1872-1889), the predecessor of Menelik II, and a Tigrayan chose Amharic for official communication. Why he acquiesced to Amharic rather than Tigrinya is not clear.
What is clear, is the role Orthodox Christianity, has played in Ethiopia’s history and in perpetuating Amharic across the empire. Amharic (along with Tigrinya and Tigre) is a Semitic language that derives from Geez and is the liturgical language of the church. The Orthodox Church and Ethiopian Emperors had a long history of co-dependence, each supporting the other’s prominence. Even though Emperor Haile Selassie (1930-74) allowed for religious plurality, the Orthodox Church remained the state religion. Even the Marxist Derg, which ruled Ethiopia in the 1980s, gave budgetary support to the church.
This link to the church has allowed Amharic to be promoted as a language given by God to Abyssinia and even today this linguistic exceptionalism is deeply embedded in Ethiopian political discourse. As an example of this attitude, professor John Markakis quotes an Ethiopian historian who writes what he heard from an Ethiopian who was educated abroad: “It is for the Galla (Oromo) to become Amhara (not the other way round); for the latter possess a written language, a superior religion and superior customs and mores.” Galla is a derogatory term for Oromo.
This common attitude illustrates what French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu observed: “Cultural and linguistic unification is accompanied by the imposition of the dominant language and culture as legitimate, and by the rejection of all other languages into indignity”.
After Amharic was granted constitutional status in 1955, a Ministry of Education report declared: ‘the promotion of Amharic at the various levels […] is an important task that is fundamental to national integration.’
In the pursuit of homogeneity, the government began the process of changing place names. The Oromo town of Adama became Nazaret, and Bishoftu was known as Debre Zeyit. There is even a heated debate about whether the capital’s name is Addis Ababa (Amharic) or Finfinnee (Afaan Oromo).
This linguistic suppression has resulted in Oromos and other non-Amhara peoples who feel ashamed of their birth given names and who have Amharized their names. Even Haile Selassie’s never acknowledged his mother’s Oromo and Gurage descent, presumably because he considered it as a stain in his noble, Amhara heritage.