Transliteration

Please note that Amharic words written in Roman script do not always follow an official or standard system of transliteration. The spelling in the transliterations has sometimes been modified to enable you to pronounce the words more correctly. Amharic is not always a one-sound/one symbol language. Characters will sometimes vary their sound depending on their position in a word. Some combinations of characters take on completely new sounds, just as they do in English. In addition, there are some single consonant characters in Amharic script which take on double consonant sounds in certain words. We have used double consonants in the transliterations to indicate these sounds.