A trader moving goods from Wolaita Sodo to Addis Ababa does not ask which language “owns” the road. A job-seeker in Adama approaches Afan Oromo not as a test of loyalty, but as a vital currency for connection. A driver at the Mojo dry port switches languages the way he shifts gears—because survival demands it. Yet Ethiopia’s language policy is built as if none of this were true.
Recently, a question has been circulating across African public debate that should unsettle Addis Ababa as much as Harare: why do African states obsess over linguistic purity while economies reward linguistic flexibility? While politicians police identity, global powers learn African languages not out of love, but out of calculation. They understand something our policies refuse to admit: language is not just culture. It is also a system of coordination—an infrastructure of communication, power, and belonging.
Ethiopia’s language crisis is not caused by multilingualism. It is caused by a mistaken idea of what language is.
For three decades, the Ethiopian state has treated language as a fixed object—bounded, countable, and tied to territory. In policy, language functions like a flag planted on administrative land. In real life, language functions differently: as a resource people deploy strategically to move, trade, work, belong, and survive. Yet language is not only a tool; it also carries symbolic weight. Languages gain legitimacy through institutions—schools, courts, and media—that authorize some forms of speech as “official” or “proper.” The gap between lived multilingual practice and institutionalized symbolic power lies at the heart of our recurring language tensions.
The Practice Gap: When Policy Refuses to See Reality
The Ethiopian constitution imagines a neatly ordered linguistic landscape: one region, one dominant language, one administrative code. But everyday Ethiopia is not neatly ordered. It is crowded, mobile, and multilingual.
This produces what might be called a practice gap: the distance between how the state thinks language works and how people actually use it. By tying language rights almost exclusively to territory, policy has unintentionally created linguistic islands. These islands are not cultural havens; they are internal trade barriers.
A young graduate in Gambella quickly learns this lesson. To succeed locally, they need their mother tongue. To succeed nationally—to access Addis Ababa’s labor market, industrial corridors, or federal institutions—they need a repertoire. But a repertoire is not merely the sum of different languages; it is the capacity to deploy specific codes in specific contexts where they carry legitimacy and value. Everyday multilingualism is shaped not just by choice, but by the settings—schools, workplaces, public offices—in which certain languages are recognized as appropriate.
We are training citizens for a static, village-based economy that no longer exists, while the real society—its markets and institutions together—demands movement across linguistic spaces. The state often rewards symbolic identity; the economy and public services reward communicative flexibility.
Who Really Benefits From Monolingualism?
The strongest evidence that Ethiopia’s language regime is broken lies not in theory, but in class practice.
For the political and economic elite, multilingualism is normal. Their children attend schools where Amharic, English, and often a third or fourth language are standard. These children are not trained to defend linguistic purity; they are equipped with linguistic capital. They can navigate both the symbolic hierarchies of state institutions and the practical requirements of markets and mobility.
For the rural poor and much of the urban working class, the state prescribes a different path: strict mother-tongue education with weak transitions to federal and global working languages. The result is a quiet but powerful stratification. The elite possess the linguistic capital to navigate the federation and the world. The poor are restricted to local linguistic citizenship, dependent on intermediaries to access the center.
We have democratized the right to a language, but rationed the power and legitimacy that come with fluency.
Ethiopia in a World of Linguistic Hierarchies
Ethiopia’s language debate also unfolds within a global hierarchy that we rarely name honestly. English and French are not just foreign languages; they are operating systems of global trade, diplomacy, science, and increasingly, digital life. Mastery of these languages determines who can access international markets, global institutions, and transnational networks of power.
Countries with complex linguistic landscapes show that multilingualism can be managed, not feared. In Switzerland, children routinely speak three or four languages, supported by schools and institutions that balance identity with mobility. South Africa and Canada demonstrate similar lessons: official languages coexist with regional ones, allowing citizens to navigate both symbolic and practical spaces. Ethiopia, by contrast, risks punishing multilingual reality rather than harnessing it as a resource for opportunity and inclusion.
Here again, inequality mirrors language. For Ethiopia’s elite, English is treated as a basic skill—acquired early, reinforced through private schooling, and used to navigate global opportunity. For millions of others, exposure to English comes late, unevenly, or not at all. The result is not cultural loss, but structural exclusion.
Mandarin is expanding the global repertoire, functioning as a new tier of infrastructure alongside English to facilitate emerging trade and technological networks. Countries that understand this treat language pragmatically. They expand repertoires rather than defend purity. Ethiopia, by contrast, risks reproducing internal linguistic rigidities on a global scale—debating identity at home while falling silent abroad.
The Fiction of the “Pure” Speaker
Underlying Ethiopia’s language conflicts is what might be called a census mentality: the belief that languages and speakers can be neatly counted, classified, and boxed. This logic flattens human complexity into administrative categories.
In Ethiopia’s towns and cities, the “pure speaker” barely exists. A child in Wolaita Sodo may speak Wolayttatto at home, Amharic in the neighborhood, and English online. This child does not have one language. They have a repertoire—situated, layered, and context-dependent—not simply a list of codes, but a capacity to shift and adapt across situations.
Yet political discourse insists on forcing choice: Are you this or that? Which box do you belong to? This demand does not reflect Ethiopian history. For centuries, people mixed languages through trade, migration, intermarriage, and religion. It is the modern state—not society—that insists on purity.
By treating languages as mutually exclusive possessions, policy transforms everyday multilingualism into a political threat. Diversity itself is not the problem. The rigid management of diversity is.
Rethinking Language: From Identity to Infrastructure
What Ethiopia needs is not another symbolic debate, but a conceptual shift.
Language is not merely communication. It is social action, power, and mobility. Languages do not exist because they are linguistically “pure”; they exist because institutions make them official, teach them, and reward their use. And people do not navigate life through single languages, but through layered repertoires—learned formally and informally, through movement and participation.
Seen this way, language policy should resemble transport or energy policy more than identity politics. The question is not who owns which language, but how access to linguistic resources expands or restricts mobility and participation.
This also clarifies why linguistic practice adapts faster than linguistic administration. Traders, drivers, migrants, and youth code-switch instinctively because coordination often happens beyond symbolic loyalty. They are not betraying identity. They are exercising agency within systems shaped by both markets and state institutions.
Toward a Repertoire Economy
None of this requires dismantling federalism or abandoning mother-tongue education. Cultural dignity and early cognitive development matter. But dignity without mobility is not empowerment. A repertoire approach shifts the focus from defending boundaries to building bridges through three strategic actions:
First, incentivize bridge languages as economic infrastructure. Learning a neighboring language should be treated as a social and economic skill, not a political concession. In Addis Ababa, providing Afaan Oromo as a formal subject is an investment in a child’s future “economic geography,” allowing them to navigate the region’s largest labor markets. Similarly, school signboards written in both Amharic and Afaan Oromo should not be viewed as territorial markers, but as navigation tools—user interfaces for a mobile public. Schools should reward linguistic range because the real-world economy already does.
Second, de-ethnicize Amharic by treating it as a shared utility. We must strip Amharic of historical burden and treat it as a public good—the “common protocol” or operating system of the Ethiopian market. Just as a merchant from Hosaena uses a standardized road to reach a warehouse, they use Amharic as a functional code to access national trade. Refusing to master this dominant language of commerce is not an act of cultural resistance; it is an act of economic self-exclusion. Policy should promote Amharic as a tool for participation that belongs to everyone, regardless of their ethnic heritage.
Third, normalize code-switching in public institutions. Government offices and public services should reflect how people actually communicate, rather than forcing citizens to “ampute” parts of their linguistic identity at the door. If a driver at a dry port or a trader in a market succeeds by shifting between languages, our institutions should follow suit. By aligning official practice with the fluid reality of the streets, we lower the cost of doing business and ensure that every citizen, regardless of their repertoire, can access the state without an intermediary.
A Country Ahead of Its State
Ethiopia is a country of fluid people governed by a rigid map. Our language debates remain trapped in a 19th-century theory of language, while society operates in the 21st.
If we continue to treat languages as flags to defend rather than repertoires to share, we will keep reproducing fear, hierarchy, and wasted potential. If we shift toward a repertoire lens—seeing language as access rather than ownership—we can lower the temperature of debate and raise the ceiling of opportunity.
Language is economics. Language is mobility. Language is symbolic power.
The question is whether policy is ready to catch up with the people who already understand this.
Tesfatsion Dominiko (PhD) in Sociology from Stellenbosch University. Freelance Research and Advisory Consultant at Telic Consulting.Tesfatsion can be reached at tesfatsiondominiko@gmail.com
