Tigre

Semitic language spoken in the Horn of Africa

Also known as Tigre language

Speakers: 800,000
Subclass of: Ethiopian Semitic
Script: Geʽez script
Indigenous to: Eritrea
, Al Qadarif
, Kassala

Overview

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia · Read full article · Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Tigre, also known as Tigrayit (ትግራይት), is an Ethio-Semitic language spoken in the Horn of Africa, primarily by the Tigre people of Eritrea. It is believed to be the most closely related living language to Ge'ez, which is still in use as the liturgical language of the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church. Tigre has a lexical similarity of 71% with Ge’ez and of 64% with Tigrinya. As of 1997, Tigre was spoken by approximately 800,000 Tigre people in Eritrea. The Tigre mainly inhabit western Eritrea, though they also reside in the northern highlands of Eritrea and its extension into the adjacent parts of Sudan, as well as Eritrea's Red Sea coast north of Zula. There is a small number of Tigre speakers in Sudan, as well as communities of speakers found in the diaspora.

Overview

Works in this language

3 linked to Tigre in Wikidata

All data

46 statements · 22% with external sources · numbers in brackets are citations

Linguistic typology: subject–object–verb
Ethnologue language status: 4 Educational
1
Sources
1.Stated in Ethnologueethnologue.com/language/tigRetrieved 2019-05-10
View statement on Wikidata ↗
Country: Eritrea
1
Sources
1.“ScriptSource - Eritrea”scriptsource.org/country/ERRetrieved 2023-08-21
View statement on Wikidata ↗
Sudan
1
Sources
1.“ScriptSource - Sudan”scriptsource.org/country/SDRetrieved 2023-08-21
View statement on Wikidata ↗
Different from: Tigrinya
Native label: ትግሬ
Has phoneme: close-mid back rounded vowel
Wikimedia language code: tig

On other databases

29 identifiers linking Tigre across the web's reference databases

10.2000, 43.8000OpenStreetMap ↗

Data quality

statements

22%

externally sourced

Source last edited August 6, 2026. AIDb refreshes this page daily.

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AIDb. (2026). Tigre (Q34129). Retrieved from https://aidb.si/e/tigre-Q34129