THE LANGUAGE POLICY IN THE PERIOD OF MAKING A CENTRALIZED STATE IN ETHIOPIA
Abstract
Amharic has been the de jure official language of Ethiopia since 1955, when this position of the language was declared in the Constitution of Haile Selassie I, Article 125. But for a long time it had been the de facto lingua franca in the multi-ethnic Ethiopian Empire. The growth of the Amharic language and the enhancement of its role as lingua franca were closely related to the creation of a centralized state. The scope of Amharic increased with the expansion of the Empire and the incorporation of people who spoke different languages. Amharic dominated the use of other languages replacing them in the area of administration, as a medium of instruction at primary school level and the language of publications and broadcasting. As the main instrument of cultural assimilation policy called “amharization”, it is criticized by some representatives of ethnic groups who believe that its “hegemonic” position in the multilingual society is unfair. The article is aimed to analyze the conditions which contributed to the transformation of the Amharic language into lingua franca and the reasons for such a status being perceived as a privileged one.
About the Author
L. N. Chernysheva
Moscow State Institute of International Relations (University),
Russian Federation
Russian Federation
76, Prospect Vernadskogo, Moscow, 119454
Chernysheva Larisa N. – Senior Lecturer at the Indian, Iranian and African Languages Department, MGIMO-University (Russia, Moscow). Research interests: socio-political vocabulary of the Amharic language, political texts in Amharic.
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Review
For citations:
Chernysheva L.N. THE LANGUAGE POLICY IN THE PERIOD OF MAKING A CENTRALIZED STATE IN ETHIOPIA. Linguistics & Polyglot Studies. 2016;(8):201-211. (In Russ.)
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