This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Ge'ez as a spoken language has been extinct for centuries, surviving only as a liturgical language, chanted and read in the services of the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo churches and, in a distinct tradition, by the Beta Israel Jewish community. Its script, though, never stopped being used. Amharic, Ethiopia's national language with tens of millions of speakers, is written in the Ge'ez script, as is Tigrinya, spoken across Eritrea and northern Ethiopia, along with Tigre and a number of smaller Ethiosemitic and Cushitic languages including Argobba, Awngi, Blin, Harari and Silt'e, each adapting the base character set with additional or modified letters for sounds Ge'ez itself never needed. The script is often called by its Amharic and Tigrinya name, fidel, in everyday use rather than by its more academic label of Ge'ez or Ethiopic script. That combination, a dead spoken language whose writing system remains in constant daily use by more than a hundred million people, is genuinely rare. Most scripts either travel with their founding language into extinction or get borrowed wholesale by unrelated languages that reshape them beyond recognition; Ge'ez script did neither, staying rooted in the same language family for two thousand years while its original spoken language quietly receded into liturgy alone.