Ethiopia and Eritrea

 It can be said a lot about the subject of language and communication but here in this blog we have pointed out the major and official languages spoken in Ethiopia and Eritrea.

Amharic is the dominant and official language of Ethiopia. It’s a Semitic language much influenced by the Cushitic language with which Amhara people have been in close contact.

Whereas Eritrea does not have any official languages but English, Italian, Tigrinya, and Arabic are languages which are commonly used in official communication.

Tigrinya and Arabic were the official languages from 1952 to 1956 and continue to be the foremost second languages, Tigrinya among the Christians and Arabic among the Muslims.

Eritrea is generally considered to have nine ethno-linguistic groups. Each of these has their own language:

• Afar,
• Arabic (spoken by the Rashaida),
• Beja
• Blin,
• Kunama
• Nara
• Saho
• Tigre and
• Tigrinya

Ethiopia has 84 indigenous languages. English is the most widely spoken foreign language. A third language, Oromigna is used by the Oromo people (They are the largest single ethnic group in Ethiopia, at 32.1% of the population according to the 1994 census, and today numbering around 40 million) living mostly in western Ethiopia.

Keywords: Amhara, Tigrinya, Oromigna, Tigrean, Amharic,

Earlier to the 1973 coup, there were very few Ethiopians living in the United States and Europe. Out-migration initiated immediately after the coup.

During this time the out-migration started in the form of small group of 3-15 people to travel across the desert by night and hide by day.

And this was so dangerous and many died on the way. Migration to the United States and Europe began in 1980, with the greatest number of Ethiopians coming to the U.S. from 1983-1993. 

Estimates of the number of Ethiopians in North America range as high as 250,000 (Hodes, 1997) and this number looks like increasing faster ever after.

In 1985 and 1991, there were major airlifts of more than 55,000 Ethiopian Jews to Israel (Operations Moses and Solomon). Most of these were illiterate farmers from the northern part of the country.

When we take the current immigrants in to account, Ethiopians/Eritreans living in the West are most often from urban backgrounds, as opposed to previous immigration trends, and many came with or obtained college degrees in their host countries.

Most live in large urban areas on the East and West coasts as well as in Houston and Dallas. Most of the Ethiopians/Eritreans living in the West are male and young.

Keywords: Operations Moses, Operations Solomon, Immigration,

Ethiopia is a republic in northeastern Africa on the Red Sea; formerly called Abyssinia and was never colonized, but in 1935 suffered terribly at the hands of Italy’s army as a prelude to WWII.

The country was ruled from 1930 until 1973 by the Emperor Haile Selassie. In 1973, the Emperor was removed from power by a group of army officers who established a oppressive Marxist military regime.

Along with the oppression came drought, famine, a secessionist movement in Eritrea, and other conflicts.

Ethiopia and Eritrea (achieved independence from Ethiopia in 1993) are now separate countries, but culturally are similar, and considered the same by some sources.

Major cultural groups living in Ethiopia comprise the Amhara and in western Ethiopia, the Oromo.

In Eritrea, Tigreans are the most common group. Other groups living in Ethiopia/Eritrea include the:

• Afar-Isas,
• Somalis,
• Wolaitas,
• Sidamas,
• Kembatas, and
• Hadiyas

Keywords: Amhara, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Afar-Isas, Somalis, Wolaitas, Sidamas, Kembatas, Hadiyas, Eritrea, Tigreans,

The present flag of Eritrea was adopted on December 5, 1995, and uses the fundamental layout of the flag of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front, with the wreath with upright olive branch symbol derived from the 1952 flag.

The flag is dominated by a red triangle extending from the hoist to the fly with complementary green and blue triangles above and below.

What do the colours symbolise?
• Green represents the fertility of the country respectively for agriculture;
• Blue represents the ocean and red for the blood lost in the fight for freedom.

In the red triangle: A yellow wreath symbol with 14 leaves on each side derived from the 1952 flag replaces the yellow star of the EPLF flag.

The use of triangles is also essential, because reading the flag from left to right it is imperative to note that the red shrinks which represents that in the end Eritrea will see peace and blood will no longer be spilled for the nation.

Keywords: Eritrea, flag,

The colours of African unity - red, green, yellow - are seen on one of the oldest African flags.

These colours were used for the national flag of Ethiopia in 1897; a year after Ethiopia determinedly defended itself from colonial Italy at the Battle of Adwa.

The flag’s tri-colour scheme was there since the early 19th c. and was formerly the official banner of the Ethiopian Empire’s Solomonic dynasty.

The royal flag often featured the symbol of a Lion of Judah, a crowned lion carrying a cross centred in the banner’s yellow mid-section.

 The flag is understood to be a link between:
• the Ethiopian church
• the peoples, and
• the nation were united in the one flag

Whilst red is currently featured at the bottom of the horizontal tricolour this was reversed in the mid 19th century and the emblem was added in 1996.

What the colours symbolise varies depending on point of view. Generally speaking:

• red represents power or African blood spilled in defence of the land
• yellow for peace and harmony between Ethiopia’s various ethnic and religious groups
• green is almost always said to symbolize the land and its fertility

Other African nations, upon their independence from their colonial rulers so often adopted these three colours that they are known as the Pan-African colours.

Earlier to 1996, and to some extent even today, the ‘plain’ flag was commonly seen across the nation and the world.

Formerly, especially during the Derg regime, a number of different emblems were experimented with.

Nevertheless, the basic colour schematic has remained constant. Even the oppressive Derg did not dare to tamper with the colours’ layout. However simply it detached and changed the imperial emblem after Haile Selassie’s overthrow.

An alternative coat of arms featuring a five pointed star and rays over a cogwheel bounded by a wreath of leaves is now the featured emblem.

The star, which is a pentagram, is yellow on a blue disc, which lays on top of the green and red stripes.

The star confirms to Ethiopia’s bright future and possibly echoes the connection with the House of King Solomon, while the yellow rays which it emits are equidistant and are said to represent the equality of all Ethiopians regardless of race, creed, or gender.

Keywords: Ethiopia, flag, Battle of Adwa, Solomonic dynasty,

Two years before the war actually broke out between Ethiopia and Eritrea, the two governments set up a secret committee to decide what was to be done about the disputed areas.

It was able to achieve very little apart from noting the contentious points. On paper, the Eritreans have a better case.

Declarations of 14 and 20 May 1998 they are only claiming the colonial border that is the line drawn at the beginning of this century between the kingdom of Italy and the Ethiopian empire.

The frontier was defined by a series of international agreements after the Italian troops was defeated in Adwa in 1896, based on a tripartite treaty which Britain, Italy and Ethiopia signed on 15 May 1902. This defines the western and central part of the border where the recent incidents occurred.

From west to east, starting at Khor Um Hagger on the Sudanese border, the frontier line follows the river Tekezze (Setit) to the point at which it meets the river Maieteb, then runs in a straight line to the river Mereb in the north, at its confluence with the Ambessa. After that it runs along the Mereb, crossing most of the central plateau, then along its tributary, the Melessa, to the east and finally along the river Muna.

There is no sign that the Ethiopian government is disputing this line, which has remained unchanged since 1902. It appears on all Ethiopian official and tourist maps, including those given to foreign ambassadors by the foreign minister in Addis Ababa on 19 May this year.

The Eritreans, nevertheless, are accusing the Tigrayan local authorities of using another map published in the Tigrayan capital, Mekele, in 1997.

According to this map, small enclaves to the north of the Melessa-Muna line (Tserona, Belissa, Alitenia) and a larger enclave to the west of the straight line between Tekezze and Mareb, in Badme, are shown as part of Ethiopia. It was here that the trouble flared early in May.

In 1902 the Badme region was almost unpopulated. At the time, Badme was the name of a plain which the border ran across. It’s situated below the Abyssinian plateau and is an extension of the Eritrean region of Gash-Setit, a semi-arid lowland area stretching westward as far as Sudan.

In the last few decades, the area has gradually been settled by farmers from both Eritrean and Ethiopian high plateaus and the Kunamas, the earliest inhabitants, have villages there.

When the United Nations federated Eritrea with Ethiopia in 1952, the 1902 line became useless.

Ras Mengesha, the Tigrayan ruler, paid very little attention to it, developing agricultural settlements administered by the Tigrayan district of Shire on both sides of the border. Since then, the area has been once in a while disputed.

In 1976 and 1981, for instance, it was the scene of clashes between the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF) and the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF).

ELF and TPLF united to fight against Mengistu’s government and the problem was temporarily shelved after the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) took control of the Eritrean resistance.

In 1987 the Colonel Mengistu government further intricate the issue by changing administrative boundaries.

At the end of the war, in 1991, the Tigrayan still regarded the area as theirs, though it was patrolled by soldiers from both countries.

The intergovernmental committee was faced with a situation that was very clear on paper - the “colonial” borders were legitimately acknowledged by both states, as well as by the Organization of African Unity and the United Nations.

However, it was highly complex in practice, especially since all the Kunama tribes’ territory had been included into Eritrea under the 1902 treaty and the Kunamas evidently took very small notice of an imaginary straight line drawn across the plain.

In the central border region, the small enclaves that were already claimed by the TPLF program in the 1970s had been in the same vague position since 1991.

However, at least this western and central part of the Eritrean-Ethiopian border is clearly defined on paper, which is more than can be said of the line to the east, along the Red Sea, separating the Eritrean Dankalia region from the Ethiopian Afar region as far as Djibouti.

According to the 1908 treaty in which this border was established, it was supposed to follow the coastline at a distance of 60 kilometers and a joint committee was to mark it out later in the field. But when the UN opened the files forty years later, they found no record of a demarcation.

The margins between the former Italian colony and Ethiopia are well known locally, but they are still unclear in a few places, particularly Bada Adi Murug, which the Ethiopians occupied last year.

The border runs right through a small fertile region overlooking the Gulf of Thio in the distance, to Burie, on the road to Assab.

Keywords: Ethiopia, Eritrea, Adwa, Tekezze, Setit, Maieteb, Mereb, Tserona, Belissa, Alitenia, Badme, Gash-Setit, Kunamas, Ras Mengesha, Tigrayan, Bada Adi Murug, Burie, Assab,