Some linguists do not believe that Geʽez constitutes a common ancestor of modern Ethiosemitic languages, but that Geʽez became a separate language early on from another hypothetical unattested language, which can be seen as an extinct sister language of Amharic, Tigre and Tigrinya. The closest living languages to Geʽez are Tigre and Tigrinya with lexical similarity at 71% and 68%, respectively. Tigrinya and Tigre are closely related to Geʽez. However, in Ethiopia, Amharic or other local languages, and in Eritrea and Ethiopia’s Tigray Region, Tigrinya may be used for sermons. Today, Geʽez is used only as the main liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church, the Ethiopian Catholic Church and Eritrean Catholic Church, and the Beta Israel Jewish community. The language originates from the region encompassing southern Eritrea and northern Ethiopia regions in the Horn of Africa. It is an ancient South Semitic language of the Ethiopic branch. Geʽez referred to in some scholarly literature as Classical Ethiopic.
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