North Ethiopic

North Ethiopic groups two North Ethio-Semitic tongues: Tigrinya, spoken in the highlands of Tigray and Eritrea, and Tigre, spoken in the Eritrean lowlands and adjoining Sudan. Both are close kin of Ge'ez, the language of writing and worship, while Tigre and early Tigrinya served as everyday speech and long went unwritten.

Tigre may have been the main vernacular of the port of Adulis. One early attestation is a fourteenth-century word list compiled for the Rasulid ruler of Yemen.

Tigrinya, written in Ge'ez script, was the tongue of Orthodox communities under the Ethiopian crown and Medri Bahri, whereas Muslim Tigre speakers commonly used Arabic as their lingua franca. The wars of the Adal sultanate and the Ottoman seizure of Massawa in 1557 bound the coastal Tigre country to the Red Sea Islamic world, while the Tigrinya highlands stayed within the Christian Ethiopian orbit.