Good morning, good afternoon, good night.

So, I am assuming most of you came across my post on Facebook a couple of days ago asking for an “odd request”: that of translating the words “good morning, good afternoon, good night” into as many languages as possible. Well, here I am giving you the reason why, since a lot of you seemed to be curious.

To be honest, the original reason I did it was out of laziness. My aunt had asked me to translate and send her those words in as many languages as I could. She’d given me no context or reason why she needed them, nor the number of languages she was after. And I, after deciding I was feeling too lazy to check WordReference, thought that a quick post on Facebook would sort it out in no time. I mean, I have enough international friends on there to get a couple of translated versions of it easily. However, to my surprise, a lot of people actually commented and, within a couple of hours, the number of different languages had risen to over 25.

Why? I have no idea. Maybe a fast procrastination excuse during the painfully long exam season we’ve had. Maybe they genuinely wanted to help. Maybe out of pure boredom. Maybe to show off their mother tongue. I know I would personally do it partly because of that. For any of you who haven’t figured it out yet, I am a language nerd. I am a native Spanish speaker who had the luck to learn English from a very young age and become bilingual. Then I decided to take up French as a third language while in primary school. By the time I got to high school I just could not wait to start learning Latin (yes, I had always wanted to learn that extinct language). Plus, I took up German lessons for a while despite having forgotten most of it by now. And then came Ancient Greek, a degree in French and Italian and additional Arabic lessons because, why not try something different? In total, how many, five or six modern languages plus two extinct ones? You can probably tell I’m a linguaphile. I just can’t help it. There is something in the way languages find equivalences in each other, as if they were some sort of algebra, despite the many differences in alphabets, syntax or vocabulary (for instance, take idioms, my love and hate) that always appealed to me. That is why my long-term goal is to become an interpreter with side-work in translation. Nerdy as it may sound, the thought of conveying the same message in various languages makes me happy. I don’t expect you to understand it; everybody has a passion for different things, turns out mine is languages.

If I have the chance to share Spanish with other people, I will happily do so. Not only because I love languages, but also because Spanish is part of my identity and getting to share just a couple of words also means I get to show a part of my culture, which I am proud of.

Anyhow, friends from all over the world got involved and, before I knew it, numbers had risen again. At that point I had finally found out why my aunt wanted the translations; apparently, she is leading a tour in couple of days and wanted a few sentences to start off in style. Well, I guess just a couple of minutes on from the time I posted, she already had more than enough to choose from. After that, I just left it out of curiosity for what people would come up with. Mother tongues, second or third languages, extinct languages, regional languages, national languages, Asian languages, European languages, different alphabets, logograms… The list goes on. I got the chance to find similarities and differences between the different languages, and perhaps get a glimpse of their different cultures. For instance, why do some languages not have a way of saying “good afternoon”? I learnt about languages written from right to left, contrary to most languages I’m familiar with. I learnt how some Nordic languages are very, very similar. I confirmed that the Cyrillic alphabet is not just Russian. The diversity and richness of languages is extraordinary.

Anyway, I have no idea what I will do with all this newly-obtained knowledge because I am definitely not able to learn all these words by heart, but I didn’t want to let it go to waste so I decided to write this short post. Thank-you to everybody who contributed from all around the world, the response genuinely amazed me!

And, without further a-do, here is the final list of languages (because I know you are now curious too):

- Buenos días, buenas tardes, buenas noches (Spanish)

- Bon dia, bona tarda, bona nit (Catalán)

- Bonjour, bonsoir, bonne nuit (French)

- Buongiorno, buon pomeriggio, buona notte (Italian)

- Bom dia, boa tarde, boa noite (Portuguese)

- Bore da, prynhawn da, nos da (Welsh)

- Good morning, good afternoon, good night (English)

- Guten Morgen, Guten Abend, Gute Nacht (German)

- Goedemorgen, goedenmiddag, goedenavond (Dutch)

- God Morgon, Gon Afton, God Natt (Swedish)

- God morgen, god ettermiddag, god natt (Norwegian)

- Guete morge, guete nametag, guuet nacht (Swiss German)

- Добре утро, добрый день, добрый вечер  (Russian)

- Добро утро, Добър ден, Лека нощ (Bulgarian)

- おはよう、こんにちは、おやすみなさい  (ohayou, kon-nichiwa, oyasuminasai) (Japanese)

- καλημέρα, καλό απόγευμα, καληνύχτα (kalimera, kalo apogevma, kalinihta) (Cypriot Greek)

- Καλημέρα, καλησπέρα, καληνύχτα (Greek)

-مساء الخير , صباح الخير (Arabic)

- בוקר טוב, ערב טוב, לילה טוב (boker tov, erev toc, laila tov) (Hebrew)

-早安, 午安, 晚安 (zhao an, wu an, wan an) (Mandarin)

- גוטן מארגן, גאטן אווענט, א גוטע נאכט (gutn morgen, gutn ovent, a gute nacht) (Yiddish)

- शुभ प्रभात (good morning - shubh prabhat), शुभ रात्रि (good night - shubh raatri) (Hindi)

- Günaydın, İyi Günler, İyi Geceler (Turkish)

- Selamat pagi, selamat tengahari, selamat malam (Malay)

- Dzień dobry, dobry wieczór, dobranoc (Polish)

- Dobro jutro, dobar dan, laku noc (Croatian)

- Labas rytas, laba diena, labanakt  (Lithuanian)

- Dobré ráno, dobré odpoledne, dobrou noc (Czech)

- Dobré ráno, dobrý deň, dobrú noc (Slovak)

- Oíche mhaith (good night) (Irish)

- Bonum mane, bona dies, bonum nocte (Latin)

- Hyvää huomenta, Hyvää iltaa, Hyvää yötä (Finnish)

*Yiddish, Arabic and Hebrew are written from right to left.