Typing in Amharic
The Amharic keyboard ( ) uses a system where the Amharic sounds are matched to
the English letters (a style called “phonetic”). You can think of how a word sounds in
Amharic and then type it out with English.
Example: typing selam becomes ሰላም
Because Amharic has more sounds than English we sometimes have to adjust this
rule. For example English does not have ‘ጠ’ and the closest similar letter would be
‘t’. In this case you should type with “capital T”:
Example: typing TienaysTlN becomes ጤናይስጥልኝ
Notice that we used capital ‘N’ also for ‘ኝ’ and we needed both “ie” together to make
the 5
th
‘ጠ’ letter ‘ጤ’. When the letter you want to type does not appear when you hit
the similar sounding key in English, try using the capital next. If typing the capital
does not work, then try hitting the key two times:
Example: typing sselam becomes ሠላም
Example: typing SSeHey becomes ፀሐይ
Next, when you need to type the extra letters of Amharic like ሏ, ሟ, ኴ you can do so
by typing an extra vowel after a ‘u’:
Example: typing mua becomes ሟ
Example: typing guie becomes ጔ
Finally, we must introduce a special rule for ' (apostrophe). Some words are spelt with
a ሳድስ (6
th
) letter followed by a vowel, like ርኤ in ገብርኤል. We use the apostrophe
here to type “gebr'iel” to make sure we get “ርኤ” instead of ‘ሬ’.
Example: typing mel'ak becomes መልአክ
Example: typing m'eeraf becomes ምዕራፍ
We also use the apostrophe for Ethiopic numbers, so '1 becomes ፩ and so on. If a ' is
needed in your document just type ' twice. This works for other punctuation as well,
typing ‘;’ once makes ‘፤’ and a second time gives English ‘;’. The typing table shows
how to type all Amharic letters, numbers and punctuation.
