How to use Amharic in Windows 7 without any extra software.

I recently got a new laptop that came preloaded with Windows 7 Home Premium. Though I knew Amharic was available on the system, it did take a little digging to enable it. I’m sharing the steps involved and I hope you find it useful.

This is for Windows 7, but I think similar steps are available in Windows Vista. Windows XP doesn’t come with Amharic fonts or input methods pre-installed.

These steps will enable Amharic input on Windows 7. They don’t describe how to change the default language of the menu to Amharic.

Note: Click on the thumbnails for larger views.

How to do it:

1. Open the Control Panel (Go to the start menu and click on Control Panel).
2. In the Control Panel, look for Clock, Language and Region and click on Change keyboards or other input methods.
3. In the Region and Language dialog that opens, first select the Keyboards and Languages tab and then click on Change keyboards.
4. In the Text Services and Input Languages dialog that opens, first select the General tab and then click on Add.
5. In the Add Input Language dialog that opens, expand the Amharic section (by clicking on the + mark). Then expand the Keyboard section (also by clicking on the + mark). Choose Amharic Input Method. Then click OK.
6. You should now have Amharic listed as one of the Installed services in the Text Services and Input Languages dialog box. Click Apply. Then OK.
7. You can now close all the windows you opened.
8. You should now notice an input selector in the lower right corner of your screen. Clicking on the EN will give you a list of available input methods. In this case it’s English and Amharic.
9. Test out the keyboard by opening Word (or Wordpad) and then changing the input method to Amharic by clicking on the input selector in the lower right corner of your screen.
10. Your input indicator should now read AM and your font in Word should have changed to Nyala. If it didn’t, select Nyala from the drop down list of fonts.

That’s it! You can now type in Amharic.

It’s not only in Word that you can type in Amharic now. Try it out on Facebook. Anyone with a unicode Amharic font will be able to read it.

I hope you found this useful. I’d love some feedback so let me know if you found this useful or not, whether the steps were easy to understand or not and so forth and so on.

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