Yabi speaking Amharic

This video was recorded by Elise Lieberman in New York City, USA, where she and Yabi grew up. Amharic is spoken by as many as 37 million people, primarily in the East African nation of Ethiopia, where it is the de facto national language, as well as by diaspora communities worldwide, especially in the United States and Israel. Though Amharic emerged as a spoken language in the 14th century CE, it was rarely used in literary contexts until the 1800s. Today, the language is written using the 2,000 year-old Ge'ez syllabary, and is widely supported by operating systems and other digital language toolkits. It is one of the world's most widely spoken Semitic languages, second only to Arabic.