Finland (Suomi)
I got supper curious about Amharic, and consequently about Tigrinya and Tigre. As far as I understand, one of the biggest problems of Ethiopia is the presence of many small languages, and from there lack of communication between different ethnic groups resulting in a division between political parties based on ethnicity rather than different policies, but at the same time, they tried to impose Amharic on everyone, which sounds insane, and on top of that they have failed.
Eritrea on the other hand had only two languages spoken by most of the population, which were also related and also spoken by almost equal proportions of people - Tigre and Tigrinya. When Ethiopians were in control, they again tried to impose Amharic on everyone and burn as many books as possible. When the state became independent, they chose Tigrinya as the sole administration languages of the two related ones and added Arabic, to please their neighbours across the Red Sea.
So I'm kind of thinking, wasn't it a blessing that they had two sister languages spoken by almost all the population and wouldn't this be the perfect foundation for creating a nation-state? Why on Earth would a government try to impose its own language on half of the population when the other half speaks something similar? And what is the situation now - is there a chance they give Tigre equal status with Tigrinya and leave Arabic in the realm of second-language education?
I listened a litte bit to two news casts from Eritrea - one in Tigre and one in Tigrinya - and I don't know if it could've been because of the pronunciation of the actual speaker, but I liked the sound of Tigre a lot more.
Are there any good ressources or any written materials in Tigre anywhere or is that language left to die?
And what the heck is going on with Arabic eating away every other language in that part of the world?
And one suggestion about the organisation of our forum - wouldn't it be cool to put all the semitic languages in one place? "Indigenous African languages" is way too vast, I think - for me it would make a lot more sense to have one place where we can discuss both Amharic and Arabic that one where we can discuss Amharic and Swahili. Or maybe leave Arabic apart because it's huge, but put the other Semitic - Cushitic languages together separately from unrelated ones?