"...Insofar it [Qwarenya] is no longer the normal means of spoken communication between the handful of individuals who retain some knowledge of it... With apparently only six remaining speakers, therefore - and speakers with markedly differing levels of competence at that - the language is plainly dead as a spoken medium... One of the Qes Tayyä's [principal informant] younger sons was training to be a priest... like his father, and he was learning portions of the prayer cycle in Qwarenya... However these sections of prayers were learned by rote and aside from these he was unable to use Qwarenya other than to recite a few standard blessings and greetings formulae, a few proverbs and pieces of songs, one or two items of basic vocabulary... A small number of other, younger members of the community could also recall a few words, learned more for amusement or curiosity than anything else."

"Nowadays they speak either Amharic, or in case of a much smaller number Tigrinya, and of course, most now also speak Modern Hebrew since the immigration of the greater part of the community to Israel in two waves during the 1990s... All six speakers normally use Amharic in their daily intercourse, and only Qes Tayyä and his wife occasionally speak Qwarenya when they do no want anyone within earshot to understand..."