The Ge'ez language (or Gi'iz language) is an ancient language that developed in the Ethiopian Highlands of the Horn of Africa as the language of the peasantry. It later became the language of the Ethiopian imperial court and of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahido Church.

Today Ge'ez remains the main language used in the worship services of the Ethiopian (and Eritrean) Orthodox Church, though Amharic (the main lingua franca of modern Ethiopia) has also been introduced in a few churches. The Ge'ez writing system, (or 'Fidel' as it is known in Ethiopia), forms the basis for most scripts used for writing the various languages of Ethiopia.

Ge'ez is also still in use by the Beta Israel Jewish community of Ethiopia for their scriptures and liturgy.

The language has been assigned the ISO 639 code gez and the SIL code GEE.

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	Greek alphabet - Wikipedia (1177 words) The fact that the Greek alphabet derives from an earlier Semitic script is uncontested, the exact source(s) of the Greek alphabet are however controversial. (For alphabets with signs solely used to designate vowels NOT derived from the Greek, see Old Turkic alphabet, Ethiopic alphabet Indic alphabets[?] Old Hungarian alphabet[?]) The first vowels were alpha, epsilon, iota, omicron, and upsilon (copied from waw), modifications of either glides or breathing marks, which were mostly superfluous in Greek. Originally there were several variants of the Greek alphabet, most importantly western (Chalcidian) and eastern (Ionic) Greek; the former gave rise to the Etruscan alphabet and thence to the Roman alphabet.
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