Toward the end of the nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of Italian peasants settled in Eritrea. Some 70.000 remained in Eritrea at the end of the Italian colonial rule in 1941. In the 1970s, when Eritrea was under Ethiopian occupation, only a few hundred remained. Many older Asmarinos still converse in Italian. English is now the language of instruction in secondary schools and is fast becoming the foreign language of choice.

During the years of the Ethiopian occupation, Amharic, the language of the ruling Ethiopian regime, was made the official language, and Eritrean languages were banned. But most Eritreans refused to speak Amharic. Instead, they continued to teach their native languages to their children.

Tigrinya, spoken by at least half the population, has its own script derived from the ancient language Gee ’ez, now only used in the Orthodox Church. The script has over 200 characters, each representing a different sound (see below). While our alphabet states a, b, c and so on, Tigrinya has its own character for ba, be, bi, bo and so on, which are mutants of the basic character. Tigrinya is by any standards a very difficult language to learn.