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About this tool
Find how to say hello in the native language of any country, with pronunciation guides, formal and informal variants, common replies, and cultural notes.
The Country Greeting Finder shows how to say hello in 34 countries, giving each one its native-script greeting, a written pronunciation guide, separate formal and informal variants, a natural reply you are likely to hear back, and a note on the accompanying gesture — bow, handshake, or cheek kiss. Search matches the country, the language or the greeting itself, so "Japan", "Japanese" and "konnichiwa" all reach the same card. It is for travellers, hosts and anyone opening a message to someone abroad who wants the greeting that fits the situation rather than a single generic word.
Open Country Greeting Finder on AltFTool — it loads instantly in your browser.
Type into the 'Search country or language…' box to filter the list of 34 countries — it matches the country, the language or the greeting itself — then click a country in the list to open its card
Read the card for the native-script greeting, the written pronunciation between slashes, the Formal and Informal variants, the Common response and the Cultural note, and press the speaker button to hear it read aloud by your browser's English voice
Press Copy greeting to put the greeting and its language on your clipboard, the star button to keep the country under Favorites, or the shuffle button to jump to a random country
You get "Buenos días" and "Hola" as distinct options, so you can match the register to the person you are addressing.
Each entry shows a natural response, so you are not caught out when the greeting comes straight back at you as a question.
Words alone can still land wrong — each card says whether the country expects a bow, a firm handshake or cheek kisses.
34, spanning Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa and the Americas — from France, Germany and Japan to Nigeria, Kenya, Iran and the Philippines. Each has one entry with its main national-language greeting.
Yes. Every entry lists a formal and an informal variant as separate fields — in Spain, "Buenos días" for formal settings and "Hola" for casual ones. When in doubt with a stranger, an elder or a business contact, use the formal form.
There is a read-aloud button that uses your browser's built-in speech synthesis, matched to the greeting's own language where your browser has that voice installed (Japanese, Mandarin, Hindi, Korean, Russian, Greek, Arabic, Thai, Hebrew and Persian each get their own voice; other entries use an English voice). Voice availability still depends on what is installed on your device, so treat it as a rough guide only. The written pronunciation on each card — IPA for European languages, romanisation for scripts like Japanese and Chinese — is the more reliable reference.
Each entry covers a single widely used greeting per country, so multilingual countries such as India, Canada and South Africa are represented by one language rather than all of them. In a region with a strong local language, ask which greeting people there actually prefer.