Story by Salina Pressimone, Staff Writer for Pitt News
Photography courtesy of Raka Sarkar, Senior Staff Illustrator for Pitt News
“Kä, ku, ki. Rä, ru, ri. Tä, tu, ti.”
Junior Ruth Dereje sounds out each letter as she transcribes the intricate Amharic symbols on the chalkboard inside the Irish Room with precise delineations of each of their most minute but crucial features. Behind her, professor Waganesh Zeleke expands and shapes her mouth to emphasize the slight differences in sounds.
While there are only two students currently enrolled in Pitt’s inaugural Amharic course, the intimate classroom setting provides for an efficient and productive meeting time. The class convenes twice per week, and one session involves a slate of oral, listening, reading and writing activities.
“Mäskäräm, t’ik’imt, hïdar, tahsas, t’ir,” Zeleke sounds out a few of the months of Ethiopia’s thirteen-month year — providing explanation for the country’s last one that consists of just five or six days.
“That’s a short month,” Dereje responds.
“For me, language is part of identity,” Zeleke, a native speaker of Amharic who was born in Ethiopia, said. “So it’s not only language as a tool to share information or to exchange, but it’s also part of your culture, it’s part of the identity for someone who speaks it.”
The three relay discussions in Amharic about traditional and modern clothing in Ethiopia, how Ethiopians rely on natural sunlight for telling time and which dash separates a “ha” sound from a “hu” sound.
More than 25 million people worldwide speak Amharic — the official language of Ethiopia — as their native language. It is the second most commonly spoken Semitic language after Arabic, and according to Zeleke who teaches the course, it is becoming highly popular in major U.S. cities. And the Ethiopian population in the United States has risen about 25 percent since 1980, making it the second-largest African immigrant group in the country according to the Migration Policy Institute.
Now Ethiopia’s influence has spread to Pitt as a way to further develop the Africana studies program at the University.
To read the full article visit www.pittnews.com.
