Ethiopia is a diverse country without an official national language, where Amharic has been the country’s federal working language and regional states have been left to make their own choices. However, a new language policy has been ratified to include the Oromo, Tigrayan, Somali and Afar languages as federal working languages. Language dilemmaIn a nutshell, the language dilemma is between granting more federal working status, with the respective economic challenges, or setting just one federal working language, and suffering unfavorable political repercussions. Hence, one way to balance these interests would be to introduce one language to play the role of a federal working language. As such, making English a compulsory federal working language would be a forward-looking strategy as it is increasingly popular among the youth and is perceived to be neutral for all our ethnic groups, making it a federal working language could also counter the weakened sense of unity in the country.

Source: Ethiopian News October 12, 2020 05:26 UTC