A Frequency Dictionary of Amharic Written (ዐማርኛ): With a supplement of Spoken Amharic

Amharic is estimated to have 6 million orthographic words in its repertoire, and due to its sheer size and lack of time, one has to select a sample out of these 6 million words to study the vocabulary of Amharic. For the selection to represent, the repertoire requires a rank-frequency dictionary – highly frequent words have to be chosen based on their broader use in the language.A Frequency Dictionary of Amharic (ዐማርኛ), a general service word list, is an invaluable tool for students, researchers of Amharic, and NLP study of under-resourced languages. The dictionary also serves as a valuable source for cultural and social studies of the speakers of the language.The book is modeled after the state-of-the-art Routledge’s Frequency Dictionaries. The series renders a robust model, an invaluable tool for replicating and producing a frequency dictionary from corpora. Creating a similar book in structure, methodology, and content also helps to conduct comparative studies among languages.Amharic is “a modern Ethiopian Semitic language” (Kržyzanowska 2017:210), which is “the working language of the Federal Government of Ethiopia” (Amberber 2023:415). Based on Amanuel N. Mersha’s corpora of 160 million words (web-corpus) of Amharic and about 80 million words of written Amharic, and the University of Oslo’s 154,000 words of spoken Amharic, this frequency dictionary of Amharic lists the 5000 top most frequently used (high ranking) words (Types) in the language with their Part-of-speech (POS) tag, transliteration, English translation, rank and raw frequency of them using two corpus computing software, Antconc 4.0.2 and Glossa. Alternatively, users can access the top 5000 word types of the language through the main rank frequency listing or an alphabetical index. In addition, there are fifteen key categories of thematically organized lists of sample words for quick reference. Although the book’s primary focus is on written Amharic, a supplement of top-ranking 6000 words of spoken Amharic is included.Daniel Aberra is a former assistant professor in the Linguistics Department at Addis Ababa University and taught at various colleges in Ethiopia. He also serves as a TA, RA and sessional instructor at the University of Alberta. In addition, Daniel Aberra compiled two related books; the Proverbs in Amharic and the Riddles in Amharic. Read more