Amharic

Ge'ez (also written Geʽez or Ethiopic) is a syllabary descended from ancient South Arabian scripts. Each character represents a consonant-vowel pair, and the consonants modify shape slightly to indicate which of seven vowel forms accompany them. The script is used to write Amharic, Tigrinya, and several other languages of the Horn of Africa. It's one of the few major writing systems with a continuous documented history stretching back to the 4th century CE.

Most Semitic languages — Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic — are VSO or SVO. Amharic's SOV order is unusual within Semitic and reflects centuries of contact with surrounding Cushitic languages (Oromo, Sidamo) which are SOV. The same pressure also shaped some other syntactic features in Ethiopian Semitic that make the family quite distinct from its Arabian and Levantine relatives.

Throughout Ethiopia as the federal working language, with the highest concentration of native speakers in the Amhara region (historically the heartland) and in Addis Ababa as the country's capital and administrative centre. Amharic is the lingua franca for Ethiopians of many ethnic backgrounds, used in business, government, education, and inter-ethnic communication.

Both are Semitic, but in different branches. Amharic is South Semitic (Ethiopic group); Arabic is Central Semitic. They share the root-and-pattern morphology that defines the Semitic family but have evolved separately for thousands of years. Modern Amharic and Arabic share some loanwords (especially through religious vocabulary and trade) but are not mutually intelligible.

Yes, two: masculine and feminine. Verbs, adjectives, and pronouns all agree. Amharic also has a developed system of object-marking on verbs, where the verb takes affixes that agree with both subject and object. Polite forms substitute the second-person plural for singular when addressing a respected single person — a politeness strategy shared with several Cushitic languages of the region.