Our world has progressed tremendously in the last few decades in the domain of computers, communication, science and technology, and so on. This rapid modernisation has resulted in a massive influx of new terminologies into languages of the world. The situation is no different in Ethiopia. Since the 1950s Amharic has extensively borrowed from European languages, especially English, in various fields, but mostly in science and technology.

This chapter sets out to examine the ways in which Amharic has tried to incorporate lexical items, phrases and idiomatic expressions from English. The first of its four sections is an introduction with general information about Amharic, such as its history, its position within Semitic and a brief linguistic description. The very short second part concerns the contact between Amharic and English. The third and major section addresses the areas of connection mainly between Amharic and English. The various types of loan words are analysed, and loan-word adaptations employed by Amharic to incorporate these lexical items are discussed. The sociolinguistic factors that triggered the loan word adaptations are likewise discussed. The final section summarises the findings.

Ethiopia is a country with a diverse range of ethnic groups and a multitude of languages. Various linguists working on Ethiopian languages have made different approximations of the number of languages spoken in the country. Thus according to Bender et al. (1976: 15–16) there are 71 languages while according to Meyer and Richter (2003: 23) more than 70 languages and several dialects are spoken in its territory. Hudson (2004: 162), based on the 1994 Ethiopian population census, lists 73 languages plus two extinct Ethio-Semitic languages, namely Ge'ez and Gafat. All the languages of Ethiopia belong to the Afro-Asiatic or the Nilo-Saharan families of languages. The Afro-Asiatic family subsumes Semitic, Cushitic and Omotic subfamilies, and most Ethiopian languages belong to it.