Languages of Eritrea

Languages of Eritrea^[1]
Languages of Eritrea
	Restaurant with sign in Tigrinya and English (Keren, Eritrea)
Main	Tigrinya, Tigre, Kunama, Bilen, Nara, Saho, Afar, Beja
Foreign	English, Arabic, Italian (previously)
Signed	Eritrean Sign Language, older sign languages
Keyboard layout	QWERTY;

The main languages spoken in Eritrea are Tigrinya, Tigre, Kunama, Bilen, Nara, Saho, Afar, and Beja. The country's working languages are Tigrinya, Arabic, English, and formerly Italian.

Tigrinya is the most widely spoken language in the country and had 2,540,000 native speakers out of the total population of 5,254,000 in 2006.^[3] The remaining residents primarily speak other languages from the Afroasiatic family, Nilo-Saharan languages or Indo-European languages.

^ ^a ^b Hailemariam, Chefena; Kroon, Sjaak; Walters, Joel (1999). "Multilingualism and Nation Building: Language and Education in Eritrea" (PDF). Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. 20 (6): 474–493. doi:10.1080/01434639908666385. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2015-09-23. Retrieved 2012-04-04.
^ "Africa :: Eritrea — The World Factbook - Central Intelligence Agency". www.cia.gov. Archived from the original on June 12, 2007.
^ "Eritrea". Ethnologue. Retrieved 9 November 2017.

[langpol-1] Hailemariam, Chefena; Kroon, Sjaak; Walters, Joel (1999). "Multilingualism and Nation Building: Language and Education in Eritrea" (PDF). Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. 20 (6): 474–493. doi:10.1080/01434639908666385. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2015-09-23. Retrieved 2012-04-04.

[cia_factbook-2] "Africa :: Eritrea — The World Factbook - Central Intelligence Agency". www.cia.gov. Archived from the original on June 12, 2007.

[3] "Eritrea". Ethnologue. Retrieved 9 November 2017.

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