ADDIS ABEBA, Nov 11 (The African Portal) – The question of whether Geʿez (aka, classical Ethiopic or ግዕዝ) is truly a “dead” language and whether it merits inclusion in school curricula continues to provoke scholarly and educational debate.
Recently, there has been growing interest in introducing Geʿez as an active language in schools across the Amhara and Tigray regional states. Six years ago, the Tigray Regional Government, in collaboration with the Tigray Language Academy, initiated discussions regarding the potential inclusion of Geʿez in school curricula. Last year, the Amhara Education Bureau announced plans to introduce Geʿez as a subject in primary schools, beginning from grade three. This was followed by a recent announcement made by Bahr Dar University to introduce an immersive Geʿez studies program at the tertiary level (PhD).
More recently, triggered by these policy directives, the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences (EAS) held a forum on the issue, which brought together scholars primarily from Addis Ababa University. Many of the participants were colleagues and peers from my early career, including friends and professors whom I had the pleasure of seeing virtually after a long while.
Geʿez was the official language of the Kingdom of Axum, one of the most influential states of Late Antiquity. It later became the liturgical and administrative language of the Ethiopian, Eritrean, and diasporic Orthodox Tewahdo Churches and the Ethiopian and Eritrean Catholic Churches. The language endures in ecclesiastical manuscripts such as the Physiologus (a work of natural history), Kebre Negast (Glory of Kings), Fetha Negast (Law of the Kings), and the Book of Enoch.
Moreover, Geʿez continues to find relevance in modern digital archives, including the Princeton Ethiopian, Eritrean, and Egyptian Miracles of Mary (PEMM) at Princeton University and monastic manuscript collection at the University of Toronto, and Betä-mäs’haft at the University of Hamburg, demonstrating that Geʿez remains dynamic rather than static.
Geʿez speakers long ago shifted to Tigrinya, Tigré, and Amharic, all modern Semitic languages of the Horn. The jury, however, is still out on whether the modern languages directly descended from Geʿez or whether Geʿez and the modern Semitic languages all evolved from a single proto-language. In terms of lexical and morphological similarities, Geʿez has a sibling-level relationship with Tigrinya and Tigre but a distant cousin one with Amharic. While Tigre and Tigrinya also have a Cushitic influence (e.g., Agew), Amharic is a distant cousin because it involves a significant admixture of Cushitic (Agew and Sidamma) grammatical properties.
The status of Geʿez as a “dead language” has long been taken as an uncontroversial fact within mainstream historical linguistics. After all, no communities speak Geʿez as a mother tongue; it is not used in daily conversation, and it is no longer evolving naturally through generations of native speakers. Yet, this technical classification belies a more complex reality. Geʿez continues to play a role in education, religion, science, and even popular culture.
In this context, the question “Is Geʿez dead?” or “Does it merit inclusion in school curricula?” becomes less about strict linguistic definitions and more about how we define language vitality, cultural continuity, and the future of human communication. This essay explores both sides of this debate while also considering how recent developments, including early language education models and artificial intelligence, complicate conventional wisdom.
Geʿez Is Dead: Supporting arguments
From a linguistic standpoint, Geʿez meets nearly all the criteria of a dead language. It has no native speaker population; it does not undergo spontaneous grammatical or phonological evolution; and it lacks a community that uses it as a primary means of everyday communication. By the standards of structural linguistics, particularly as pioneered by Ferdinand de Saussure, Geʿez no longer functions as a living system of parole (active speech), even if its langue (structure) remains studied and preserved.
Geʿez’s use today is largely archival or ceremonial. It appears in church liturgies, mottos, monastic rituals, and historical archives, but these are residual or symbolic uses, not signs of a living speech community. This functional stasis further supports the classification of Geʿez as dead. In contrast, languages such as Amharic—descendants of Geʿez—have thrived precisely because they continued to evolve organically in speech communities. Geʿez, by contrast, became frozen in its classical form, preserved primarily by scholars and religious institutions.
Another argument for the view that Geʿez is a “dead” language lies in its educational use. Despite centuries of being taught in schools, Geʿez is generally not acquired for communication but for translation and reading comprehension.
The study of Geʿez and its historical development has been pursued by a number of scholars, particularly in the fields of historical linguistics, philology, and general philosophy. The vast majority of Geʿez learners are never expected to speak it conversationally, however. This contrasts sharply with modern language education, which prioritizes immersion and active use. Consequently, Geʿez often remains an intellectual exercise, disconnected from the kinds of real-world engagement that sustain living languages.
Credit: Addis Standard
