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 IsraelJewish community of Ethiopia for their scriptures and liturgy.
The language has been assigned the ISO 639 code gez and the SIL code GEE.
The name is derived from the first four characters of an order of the Ethiopicscript used in some religious contexts (this order seems to correspond to the ancestral semitic character order (aleph, beth, gimel, daleth / ABCD /...).
The Ethiopicscript is an abugida, although the vowel modifications in Ethiopic are not entirely systematic.
The largest single group of abugidas is the Brahmic family of scripts, however, which includes nearly all the scripts used in India and Southeast Asia.
Ethiopic[EthEop´ik] Pronunciation Key, extinct language of Ethiopia belonging to the North Ethiopic group of the South Semitic (or Ethiopic) languages, which, in turn, belong to the Semitic subfamily of the Afroasiatic family of languages (see Afroasiatic languages).
Ethiopic (also called Geez or classical Ethiopic) ceased to be a spoken tongue in Ethiopia some time before the 14th cent.
Although the script used for Ethiopic and other Semitic tongues of Ethiopia is syllabic rather than alphabetic, it seems to be derived from the alphabetic South Semitic writing of the Old South Arabian inscriptions, to which it shows many similarities.
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