 Tigrinya has a fairly typical set of phonemes for an Ethiopian Semitic language.That is, there is a set of ejective consonants and the usual seven-vowel system.Unlike many of the modern Ethiopian Semitic languages, Tigrinya has preserved the two pharyngeal consonants which were apparently part of the ancient Ge'ez language and which, along with [x'], a velar or uvular ejective fricative, make it easy to distinguish spoken Tigrinya from related languages such as Amharic, though not from Tigre, which has also maintained the pharyngeal consonants.