Tigrinya, also spelt Tigrigna, is spoken in Ethiopia as an official working language and in Eritrea as the national language. There is also a large Tigrinya speaking population in Israel, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and other countries. It is closely related to Amharic, spoken in Ethiopia, and Tigre, spoken in Eritrea, and is distantly related to other Semitic languages such as Arabic and Hebrew. Tigrinya is written in the Ge’ez script, in which each symbol represents both a consonant and a vowel.