The Compass DeRose Guide to Saying Hello Anywhere

This page was written by Steven J. DeRose, and was last updated on 2003-03-23.

I enjoy learning at least a few greetings and useful phrases in as many languages as possible, beyond those languages where I put in some real learning effort. If you can recognize accents, or guess from name badges, you can make a lot of people smile merely by greeting them in their own language. Of course, some sensitivity is also required -- for example, it may be less than ideal to greet some people from parts of the former Soviet state in Russian, or to guess at an accent and come out with the greeting for the country next door that happens to be at war....

This page will provide a handful of basic greetings and phrases in as many languages as I can accumulate. If you know a language that's not listed, a form is available to fill out so I can add it.

For the moment, I'm organizing this as one page per language. Each page has a table with a row for each word or phrase. There are columns for English (because that's my native language and I get to pick), and then columns for what I hope are near equivalents in the langauge that particular page is about. There are columns for the translation written in Latin (English) letters, and also in the language's own writing system. There are also columns for links to audio files and for any relevant notes.

I do not speak many of these languages fluently, so I apologize in advance for the inevitable errors, large or small. If you find errors, please let me know.

If you can add a language I don't have here, please download this HTML page, save it locally, and fill in the blanks with the right information for your language. Then mail it to me. There's a place to identify yourself, and you can include a contact email if you like (I look at what goes out there, though, so obvious spam will be rejected, and I reserve the right to final choice of what goes on my pages).

I admire the variety, complexity, and beauty of the many writing systems of the world. If you are able to include actual spellings in the native character sets using Unicode, please do so (the form includes a column for this). But please also include a transliteration into the English alphabet to help the general reader have a chance of pronunciation. I've put a simple guide to transliteration here.

Thanks, and enjoy!

Some other language resources on the Web

The iLoveLanguages site has links to many other resources. Their dictionary page lists about 130 dictionary sites. They also have a page that organizes resources by language.

Ectaco provides a wide variety of bilingual dictionaries.

Lexicool "currently has links to over 2000 translation dictionaries and glossaries freely available on the internet".

Languages available

The table below is derived from ISO 639. The SIL Ethnologue provides a much more precise set of language names, but for the moment these will do. I've left in the ISO 639 code values in case they may be useful to some readers. If the English column is a link, then it should lead to a page with standard set of phrases this page is meant to provide.

Back to home page of Steve DeRose or The Bible Technologies Group. or The Bible Technologies Group Working Groups. Or, contact me via email (fix the punctuation).