BoyNames.net

Ethiopian boy names

Ethiopia's naming stock comes from a different language family than anywhere else on this part of the site. Amharic and Tigrinya are Semitic languages — cousins of Arabic and Hebrew — written in the Geʽez script, an alphabet of more than two hundred signs in which each character carries a consonant and its vowel together. The names that follow are grouped by language, because Tigrinya is not Amharic and the distinction matters to the people who speak them.

Traditional Amharic names

Amharic is the language of Addis Ababa and the national working language, and most of these names are ordinary verbs and nouns put to work. A great many are third-person perfect verbs — he has flowered, he has sprouted, he became weighty — which gives Amharic naming its distinctive quality of reporting something that has already happened rather than wishing for something that has not.

The Geʽez compound names

Geʽez is the ancient liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, and it supplies a set of names that are only half a sentence. Each of these is a construct form meaning "something of", and it waits for a divine person or a feast to complete it: Haile Selassie is power of the Trinity, Gebremariam is servant of Mary, Tekle Haymanot is plant of the faith. Modern paperwork often runs the two halves together, which is why the foreign press so regularly mistakes the second half for a surname.

Tigrinya names, which are not Amharic

Tigrinya is the language of Tigray in northern Ethiopia and of most of Eritrea. It is a separate Semitic language from Amharic, closer to Geʽez, and it has its own stock of given names. Ethiopian and Eritrean names are routinely lumped together in English-language name lists; a Tigrinya speaker will notice immediately, and these four are unmistakably northern.

Biblical names in Ethiopian dress

Ethiopia was one of the first states anywhere to adopt Christianity, when the Aksumite king Ezana converted in the fourth century, and the church has kept its own calendar, canon and liturgy ever since — a canon of eighty-one books that preserves the Book of Enoch complete in Geʽez and nowhere else. Scripture arrived in Geʽez, so these names took Geʽez shapes rather than Latin or Greek ones.

How Ethiopian naming works

There are no inherited surnames. A person's second name is their father's given name, and the third, where one is used, is the grandfather's. Abebe Bikila was Abebe, son of Bikila, and his children were not Bikilas. Zersenay Tadese was Zersenay son of Tadese; Abel Tesfaye, who records as The Weeknd, carries his father's name in the slot a Western reader takes for a family name. The system has practical consequences: Ethiopian directories alphabetise people by their first names, because the second one tells you nothing about the family, and Western forms that demand a surname routinely freeze a father's given name into one by accident. It also means every name on this page can appear in either position, which is why Mekonnen and Getachew look to English eyes like surnames and are not.

The other thing to know is that this stock is not exclusively Christian, even though the Geʽez compounds and the biblical names dominate any list of it. Roughly a third of Ethiopians are Muslim and draw largely on Arabic; the Beta Israel, Ethiopia's Jewish community, carried Amharic names of exactly the kind above with them when most of the community moved to Israel; and Ethiopia has around eighty languages, with Oromo the largest by number of speakers, each with naming habits of its own. What the names here share is the highland Semitic tradition and the script it is written in. For the rest of the continent see African names, and for the neighbouring coast, Swahili names — both listed with everything else in the origins index.

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