Abstract

Tigre is spoken in Eritrea and Eastern Sudan and is the fifth largest Semitic language by number of speakers (1.4 million speakers, www.ethnologue.com/language/tig) after Arabic, Amharic, Tigrinya and Hebrew. It has the largest geographic footprint of the eight languages in Eritrea and is the first language for the majority of the northern half of the country: from the northern border southward to Massawa and environs on the Red Sea coast, westward to areas south of Aqurdat (except for the Bilin-speaking areas surrounding Keren) and northward throughout most of the Anseba region. Bordering these first-language areas, Tigre is a second (or other) language spoken with most of the other languages in Eritrea (see Map 7.1).