Amharic and Afaan Oromo are the two most widely spoken languages in Ethiopia.

Many people assume they’re highly similar because they’re spoken within the same national borders.

However, these two languages are distinct and belong to entirely different language families.

This guide breaks down exactly how Amharic and Afaan Oromo differ in their origins, writing systems, grammar, and vocabulary.

Language families

Amharic is a Semitic language.

This means it’s in the same language family as Arabic, Hebrew, and Tigrinya.

Because of this, Amharic shares many root words and grammatical patterns with these Middle Eastern and East African languages.

Afaan Oromo is a Cushitic language.

It belongs to a different branch of the Afroasiatic language family entirely.

Its closest linguistic relatives are Somali, Afar, and Sidaama.

An Amharic speaker can’t naturally understand an Afaan Oromo speaker without studying the language first.

Writing systems

The most obvious difference between the two languages is how they’re written.

Amharic uses the Ge’ez script.

This script is often referred to as Fidel.

It’s an abugida writing system where each character represents a consonant and a vowel combined.

There are hundreds of unique characters to learn in the Amharic alphabet.

Afaan Oromo uses a modified Latin alphabet called Qubee.

If you can read English, you can easily recognize the letters used to write in Afaan Oromo.

Qubee was officially adopted for Afaan Oromo in 1991 to better represent the specific sounds of the language.

This makes Afaan Oromo much easier for English speakers to start reading right away.

Grammar differences

Both Amharic and Afaan Oromo share a Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) sentence structure.

In both languages, the verb is almost always placed at the very end of the sentence.

However, the way they build their words is completely different.

Amharic relies heavily on a root-and-pattern system.

You take a root of three consonants and insert different vowels to change the core meaning of the word.

Afaan Oromo builds words mainly by adding suffixes to the end of a base word.

It doesn’t use the consonant root system found in Semitic languages like Amharic.

Gender rules also work differently in both languages.

Amharic has a strict masculine and feminine gender system that heavily affects nouns, verbs, and adjectives.

Afaan Oromo also has grammatical gender, but it relies on completely different markers and rules for agreement.

Vocabulary comparison

Because Amharic and Afaan Oromo come from different language branches, their everyday vocabulary is entirely different.

Here’s a quick look at some basic words in both languages.

Here’s how a basic greeting looks in Amharic.

Here’s how that same greeting translates into Afaan Oromo.

As you can see, the words and sentence formations don’t overlap at all.