How To Say Thank You In 20 Languages
It’s European Day of Languages, and to celebrate, we’re going multi-lingual for the day…
How many languages can you speak? According to the Council of Europe, the brains behind European Day of Languages, at least half of the world’s population are bilingual or ‘plurilingual’, which means they’re fluent in more than two. And for those of us who are lagging behind, a campaign was launched yesterday to get everyone in the UK learning 1000 words in another tongue.
In the spirit of all things linguistic, then, we did a straw poll in the office this morning to see who could say ‘thank you’ in the most languages. It’s up there with ‘hello’ in the list of essential phrases you’ll need on holiday, after all. And as someone wise once said, manners cost nothing.
The winning figure? A fairly respectable 7 – including 2 from outside of Europe – from Rosa on our production team. See if you can do better, then check if you missed any from our pick of 20 European languages below.
How To Say Thank You in 20 Languages
Croatian: hvala
Danish: tak
Dutch: dank u
Estonian: aitäh
Finnish: kiitos
French: merci
German: danke
Greek: efharisto
Hungarian: köszönöm
Italian: grazie
Latvian: paldies
Lithuanian: ačiū
Maltese: nirringrazzjak
Polish: dziękuję
Portuguese: obrigado
Romanian: mulțumesc
Slovak: ďakujem
Slovene: hvala
Spanish: gracias
Swedish: tack
Can you beat the Thomson team and say ‘thank you’ in more than 7 languages?