Arabic Greetings, Thank You and Common Phrases, With Replies

The Arabic greeting that works everywhere is السلام عليكم (as-salamu ʿalaykum, peace be upon you), and the reply is wa ʿalaykum as-salam. Hello itself is marhaba in the Levant, ahlan in Egypt and hala in the Gulf. Thank you is شكرا (shukran) everywhere, answered with ʿafwan.

Arabic greetings come in pairs. Each one has a reply people expect, and a phrase list that gives only the greeting leaves you stuck on the second line. The two tables below give 13 greetings and 11 ways to say thank you, each with its answer, in Modern Standard Arabic, Levantine, Egyptian and Gulf Arabic. After them come 39 everyday phrases and the numbers one to ten. Last reviewed October 2026. In the transliteration, ʿ is the throat sound ع and ʾ is a glottal stop; the full key is further down.

How to say hello in Arabic, and what people say back

Say as-salamu ʿalaykum to a stranger and hear wa ʿalaykum as-salam back; that pair is the same in every Arabic-speaking country. With people you know, use the local hello: marhaba in the Levant, answered with marhabtein (two hellos); ahlan in Egypt, answered with ahlan bik; hala in the Gulf, answered with hala fik. The register column says who each one suits. Formal means safe with strangers, officials and older people, everyday means anyone you deal with, and casual means people you know.

Replies checked against Wiktionary's entries for marhaba, ahlan and maʿa as-salama, Omniglot's Egyptian Arabic phrases, Cleo Lingo's Egyptian hellos, and our own Saudi, Kuwaiti and Qatari pages.

The Gulf column is the shared core of Kuwaiti, Qatari and central Saudi speech. The Emirates break from it on the commonest greeting of all: Emiratis ask shahalak where the rest of the Gulf asks shlonak, which our Emirati Arabic guide covers. For the Saudi forms, including absher and maʿlesh, see our Saudi Arabic phrases and resources.

Good morning gets one row here because it has a page of its own. Good evening, good night, and the playful replies Egyptians and Levantines trade for sabah al-khayr are all in our guide to saying good morning in Arabic and answering it.

Two habits will make you sound less like a phrasebook. First, the answer to how are you is al-hamdu lillah, praise God, whatever kind of day you are having; then ask the question back. Second, gender follows the person you speak to: kifak to a man is kifik to a woman, and the reply changes with the speaker, so a woman answers mniha. To say see you later, Levantine speakers say بشوفك بعدين (bshufak baʿdein) and Egyptians أشوفك بعدين (ashufak baʿdein); Modern Standard Arabic uses إلى اللقاء (ila al-liqaʾ, until we meet).

How to say thank you in Arabic, and how to reply

Thank you in Arabic is شكرا (shukran), the same in every variety, and the reply is عفوا (ʿafwan). Shukran is never wrong. Each region also has warmer thank-yous of its own, and each of those has its own answer, so the table pairs them.

Checked against the Lebanese Arabic Institute's guide to thank you and you're welcome in Lebanese Arabic, Talk in Arabic's thanks by dialect, DenkArabisch on you're welcome in each dialect, GulfArabic.com on Gulf thanks, Playaling on yaʿtik al-ʿafya, and Wiktionary's teslam.

If you learn two beyond shukran, make them the local warm one and yaʿtik al-ʿafya. The first is what people say to each other, and the second thanks someone for the effort they just made, which lands better from a visitor than a plain thanks. Jazak Allahu khayran and its reply sit in a religious register; our list of Islamic phrases in Arabic pairs it with the other blessings that expect a fixed answer.

How to say please, sorry, yes and no in Arabic

Please is law samaht لو سمحت in both dialects and min fadlik من فضلك in Modern Standard, and sorry is asif آسف everywhere. Courtesy travels, and this is the one group where Modern Standard Arabic costs you nothing: asif and in sha Allah are the same in all three columns, from Casablanca to Basra. The two that do split are yes and no problem, and both splits are worth memorizing because you will hear them dozens of times a day.

How to introduce yourself in Arabic

To introduce yourself, say ismi اسمي followed by your name. That one is identical in all three varieties. What is your name is not: the three columns pull furthest apart here, because introductions lean on the everyday verbs that each variety builds its own way. Modern Standard Arabic asks ma ismuk for what is your name; Levantine fronts its question word as shu ismak; Egyptian puts the question word at the end, ismak eh. That final-position question word is the fastest way to recognize Egyptian by ear.

How to ask for directions in Arabic

The word for where is ayna أين in Modern Standard, wein وين in the Levant, and fein فين in Egypt, so where is the bathroom comes out as ayna al-hammam, wein il-hammam, and il-hammam fein. Directions run on two words, where and straight ahead, and both are dialect words. Straight ahead is dughri in the Levant, borrowed from Turkish, and ʿala tul in Egypt. Say dughri in Cairo and you will get a blank look; say ʿala tul in Amman and you will be understood but marked as someone who learned Egyptian from films.

How to ask how much something costs in Arabic

How much is this comes out as kam thaman hadha كم ثمن هذا in Modern Standard, addesh had قديش هاد in the Levant, and da bikam ده بكام in Egypt. It is the phrase you will use most and it is completely different in each column. So is I want: urid, biddi, ʿayiz. Hearing biddi is how you know within one sentence that someone is Levantine.

Arabic numbers 1 to 10

One to ten in Modern Standard Arabic are wahid, ithnan, thalatha, arbaʿa, khamsa, sitta, sabʿa, thamaniya, tisʿa, ʿashara. The dialects follow one clean rule from there: the Modern Standard ending -a stays -a in Egyptian and becomes -e in the Levant. So five is khamsa in Cairo and khamse in Beirut, and once you hear that ending you can predict most of the rest.

Arabic emergency phrases

For emergencies, learn the Modern Standard Arabic forms as well as the dialect ones. A police officer and a hospital receptionist have both been schooled in Modern Standard Arabic, and in the moment you need these words you will not be choosing carefully. Say ana ʿayyan in Cairo and ana marid anywhere, and you will be helped either way.

How to read the tables on this page

Arabic script comes first in every cell, our transliteration under it. One scheme is used throughout, and four symbols in it are not obvious.

We do not put dots under the emphatic letters. Dots help people who can already read Arabic and confuse everyone else, and the script column is there for exactly that reason. The Gulf g in ma gassart is a plain hard g: Gulf speech says it where Modern Standard has ق.

The greeting and thank-you tables run one row per phrase, with a column saying where it is said, because those phrases differ by region more than by grammar. Everything from introductions down uses the three-column method instead: one English meaning, three Arabic answers, Modern Standard, Levantine and Egyptian, picked by destination instead of averaged into a dialect nobody speaks. Where a phrase is genuinely the same in all three, the row repeats it rather than inventing a difference. Where we could not confirm what people actually say, the phrase is left out instead of carrying a guess.

Dialect or Modern Standard Arabic: which column should you learn?

Learn the dialect column for the country you are going to, and use Modern Standard Arabic only if you have no country in mind. Modern Standard is the language of newspapers and the evening news. Every Arabic speaker was taught it at school, so every Arabic speaker will understand you. Nobody greets a friend in it, though, and the reply comes back in dialect regardless.

If you have no destination and want the broadest reach, take the Egyptian column. Egyptian film, television and music were exported across the Arab world for most of the twentieth century, so a Moroccan and an Iraqi will both follow you. Our Egyptian Arabic resources page lists the courses and channels for it.

I learned Modern Standard first, through a year of daily lessons and then a university certificate built on the Al Kitaab series, and the only genuinely new material in that certificate was the dialect audio attached to each chapter. Everything else I already had. If I were starting again I would pick a dialect on day one and let the Modern Standard come along behind it.

If your reason for learning is family, work or study in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria or Palestine, take the Levantine column, and start from our Levantine Arabic resources. If it is the Gulf, our Gulf Arabic resources cover Khaleeji and its country pages. And if you are still weighing the options, we scored the eight main dialects on speaker numbers and available material in which Arabic dialect you should learn.

Four common mistakes with Arabic phrase lists

The most common mistake is memorizing a phrase list without checking which variety it is. In August 2026 we reviewed the six pages Google ranks and cites for common Arabic phrases. All six gave a single undifferentiated Arabic, mixing Modern Standard vocabulary with Egyptian pronunciation and Levantine grammar into something nobody speaks, and none of them separated Modern Standard from the spoken dialects. That is the reason this page has three columns.

Second, do not lean on the transliteration. Transliteration is a ladder you throw away: it cannot show you the difference between س and ص, or between ه and ح, and those differences change meanings. The script column above is the real one. Reading it takes about two weeks with our Arabic letters and their shapes.

Third, watch the gender. Arabic marks the person you are speaking to, so kifak to a man is kifik to a woman, and a man saying sorry says asif while a woman says asifa. Use the wrong one and you are understood, but you sound like you learned from a book.

Last, Levantine is not one thing. Palestinian and Jordanian speakers say هاد (had) for this where Lebanese speakers say هيدا (hayda), and city speech in Beirut, Damascus and Jerusalem turns ق into a glottal stop while rural and Bedouin speech keeps it. The Levantine column here is the common core that works across all of it.

Where to go next

The phrases people most often look up one at a time have their own pages. Our guide to saying I love you in Arabic gives it to a man, a woman and a group in each dialect, with the terms of endearment that go with it. For birthdays, weddings, Eid and the other occasions that each have a fixed wish and a fixed reply, see happy birthday and congratulations in Arabic.

Sixty-three phrases get you through a first trip. A conversation needs vocabulary. Our Arabic vocabulary lists hub has printable word lists and ready-made Anki decks, including the Al Kitaab list that gives every word in Modern Standard, Syrian and Egyptian, which is the same three-column idea applied to a few thousand words instead of a few dozen phrases.

Then pick a script and a dialect and stop hedging. The Arabic alphabet chart covers all twenty-eight letters in their four positional forms, and the Levantine and Egyptian resource pages tell you which book, course, or tutor to start with in each.

Once the basics are in place, the words that make you sound local are informal: our Arabic slang guide tags each word with the dialects that use it, and Arabic proverbs and sayings explains the fixed expressions you will hear in conversation.

Every row above was checked against the dialect forms we teach across this site, and the greeting and thank-you replies against the sources listed under each table. If you hear something different where you are, that is the point of the fourth mistake above: write to us at contact@openarabic.org and we will look at it.

Frequently asked questions

How do you greet someone in Arabic?

Say as-salamu alaykum, written السلام عليكم, which means peace be upon you. It works with anyone in every Arabic-speaking country, and the reply is wa alaykum as-salam, and upon you peace. With people you know, switch to the local hello: marhaba in the Levant, ahlan in Egypt, hala in the Gulf.

Is salam hello in Arabic?

Salam means peace, and it is the short form of as-salamu alaykum, peace be upon you. Said on its own it is a quick, friendly greeting. With a stranger, an official or an older person, use the full phrase and expect wa alaykum as-salam back. The everyday words for hello are marhaba, ahlan and hala.

What is a casual greeting in Arabic?

It depends on the country. Levantine friends say marhaba or ahlan, and the reply to marhaba is marhabtein, two hellos. Egyptians say ahlan and ask amil eh, how are you doing. In the Gulf it is hala, or hala wallah for someone you are pleased to see, answered with hala fik.

How do I reply to shukran?

Afwan, written عفوا, works everywhere. Egyptians also say il-afw or ala eh, which means for what, as in it was nothing. In Lebanon and Syria the usual reply is tikram to a man and tikrami to a woman. In Saudi Arabia a warm reply is allah yisallimak, may God keep you safe.

What do Muslims say after thank you?

Many say jazak Allahu khayran, may God reward you with good, instead of or after shukran. The reply is wa iyyak to a man and wa iyyaki to a woman, meaning and to you. It is the religious-register alternative to shukran.

Should I learn Arabic phrases in Modern Standard Arabic or in a dialect?

Learn the dialect of the people you will talk to, and use Modern Standard Arabic only if you have no specific destination. Nobody greets a friend or haggles over a price in Modern Standard Arabic; it is the language of news broadcasts and printed books, so a phrase like kayfa haluk is understood everywhere and sounds odd everywhere. OpenArabic.org lists every phrase in Modern Standard, Levantine, and Egyptian side by side so you can pick the form used where you are going.

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