A collection of phrases in many different languages with sound files for some of them. Some of these pages may be a bit slow to load due to the number of languages on them.
Welcome | Hello | Good morning | Good afternoon | Good evening | Good night | Good bye | How are you? | Long time no see | What's your name? | Where are you from? | Pleased to meet you | Good luck | Cheers/Good health | Bon appetit | Bon voyage | Excuse me | Sorry | How much is this? | Thank you | Where's the toilet? | Have a nice day | Get well soon | Would you like to dance with me? | I love you
I don't understand | Please say that again | Please speak more slowly | Can you please write it down? | How do you say ... in [your language]? | Do you speak ...?
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year | Happy Easter | Happy Birthday
Leave me alone! | Help! Fire! Stop! | Call the police!
Days of the week | Months of the year | Seasons
My hovercraft is full of eels | One language is never enough | Stop the world, I want to get off! | This gentleman/lady will pay for everything
It's all Greek to me | It's raining cats and dogs | As easy as falling off a log | A sandwich short of a picnic | When pigs fly | Czech idioms
Proverbs, quotations and sayings about language
Afrikaans | Albanian | Arabic (Modern Standard) | Armenian | Azeri | Belarusian | Bengali | Breton | Bulgarian | Cantonese | Catalan | Chamorro | Chinese (Mandarin) | Cornish | Croatian | Czech | Danish | Dutch | Esperanto | Estonian | Faroese | Fijian | Finnish | French | Georgian | German | Greek | Greenlandic | Hakka | Hawaiian | Hebrew | Hindi | Hungarian | Icelandic | Indonesian | Inuktitut | Irish (Gaelic) | Italian | Japanese | Javanese | Jèrriais | Kazakh | Korean | Kurdish | Lao | Latin | Latvian | Lingua Franca Nova | Lithuanian | Luxembourgish | Macedonian | Malay | Maltese | Mandarin | Manx | Māori | Mongolian | Norwegian | Occitan | Pashto | Persian (Farsi) | Polish | Portuguese (Brazilian) | Portuguese (European) | Romanian | Russian | Scots | Scottish Gaelic | Serbian | Sesotho | Shanghainese | Slovak | Slovenian | Spanish | Swahili | Swedish | Tagalog | Taiwanese | Thai | Turkish | Ukrainian | Urdu | Uzbek | Vietnamese | Welsh | Xhosa | Yiddish | Zulu
If you would like to make any corrections or additions, please
contact me. If you can provide audio recordings
of any of these phrases, please send them to
You can send me audio files in any format. If you don't know how to make recordings on a computer, you can send me recordings on audio cassette. Let me know if you want to do this and I'll send you my snailmail address. Or you can call me on Skype (omniglot) and I'll do the recording.
When learning your alphabet was there are rhyme or song you used to help remember the letters? If so, could you make a recording of it and send it to me?
I made sound files of some of the French, German and Spanish phrases using the text to speech program at: http://public.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php
People who have contributed to this section
Buy phrasebooks from:
Amazon.com
Other collections of phrases in various languages
http://www.smartphrase.com
http://www.single-serving.com
http://www.nypl.org/branch/central/dlc/df/useful.html
http://www.travelphrases.info/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/other/quickfix/
http://www.geocities.com/mailjohan/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_phrases_in_different_languages
http://wikitravel.org/en/Phrasebook
http://www.elite.net/~runner/jennifers/
http://www.smartphrase.com
http://www.loecsen.com
http://www.linguanaut.com
http://www.languageshome.com
http://www.foreignlanguagephrases.com
http://www.lingo24.com/useful-phrases.html
http://worldphrasebook.net
http://smallmarble.org/
They Thought You Would Say This: Unlikely phrases from real phrasebooks
http://www.zompist.com/thought.html
Emergency multilingual phrasebook in 36 languages produced by the British Red Cross
http://www.dh.gov.uk/
Silent Night in numerous languages (includes audio for some languages)
http://silentnight.web.za/translate/
Names of days and months in many languages
http://www.domesticat.net/misc/monthsdays.php
Der Kleine Prinz in 100 Sprachen - extracts from The Little Prince in 100 languages (includes audio): http://www2.germanistik.uni-halle.de/prinz/karten/
Mama Lisa's World - a collection of children's songs from around the world in their original languages with English translations.Some songs include musical recordings and sheet music: http://www.mamalisa.com/world/
How to say "Oh my god! There's an axe in my head" in various languages
http://www.yamara.com/axe/
The Phrase Finder - the meanings and origins of many English sayings, phrases and idioms
http://www.phrases.org.uk
Language names | Country names | UDHR | Babel | Numerals | Omniglot | Phrases
Copyright 1998- Simon Ager