Please and Thank You in Georgian, and the Reply

Most wordlists give you გმადლობთ for thank you and stop. It is the right word, but it is already a full sentence with a person built into it, and the final letter tells your listener how you have placed them. Take that letter off and you have moved from the woman behind the counter to a school friend.

The second thing that goes missing is please. Georgian does not have a tidy one-word please that you drop into a sentence the way English does. It has a short clause that means if it is possible, and a more formal verb that means I ask you, and quite often it has neither, because the politeness has already been handled by the verb ending.

The third thing is the reply. Thank you in Georgian expects an answer, an apology expects a different answer, and handing something over has its own word that is not thank you at all. Play each phrase below, say it back, and pay attention to which half of the pair you are holding.

Georgian marks the person you are speaking to inside the verb. თქვენ is the polite and plural you, შენ the familiar singular, and the difference on the end of a verb is usually a single -t. გმადლობ becomes გმადლობთ. მაპატიე becomes მაპატიეთ. So being polite is not a word you add, it is a suffix you either produce or fail to produce, and there is no way to sit on the fence.

The rough line is age and acquaintance. Anyone visibly older than you, anyone behind a counter or a desk, anyone you have just met, all get თქვენ. Friends, children, and anyone who has already switched to შენ with you get შენ. If you are a visitor, staying on თქვენ with strangers costs you nothing.

A word about the respellings here. Georgian has consonants English does not: a set of ejectives, and ყ, which is made far back in the throat and is written below as q because there is nothing better. It also opens words with clusters like gm- and gt- that English never allows. The respellings will get you understood. They will not get you correct, and the only fix for that is listening.

გმადლობთ is the default thank you and the one to lead with. It is built from the root that gives მადლი, grace, and it means something like I thank you, plural or polite. Drop the final -t and you have the version for one person you are close to.

დიდი მადლობა is useful precisely because the noun carries no person marker, so it sidesteps the whole თქვენ and შენ question. The reply to any of them is არაფრის, the genitive of the word for nothing, so literally of nothing, in the same family as the French de rien.

You will also get no words at all, just a nod, especially in shops and taxis. That is not rudeness. But when a reply does come it is almost always this one, so learning it is learning half a conversation rather than a decoration.

თუ შეიძლება is the everyday please. It means if it is possible, and it behaves like a tag: you say the request, then you add it. It works for ordering, for asking someone to move, for anything you want handed to you.

გთხოვთ is the one you will read more than you say. It heads notices, announcements and official requests, and in speech it raises the temperature: it is the please of someone making a serious request, not of someone buying bread. Note the -t again on the end, doing the same work it does in გმადლობთ.

English runs almost everything through sorry. Georgian splits the job three ways, and the three are not weak, medium and strong versions of one another. They do different things.

უკაცრავად is the opener. It is what you say before a question to a stranger, or when squeezing past someone on a marshrutka. ბოდიში is what you say after the small damage is done. მაპატიეთ is a real request for forgiveness, and it is an imperative, which is why it takes the -t when you are being polite: მაპატიე to a friend, მაპატიეთ to anyone else.

Two words follow objects around. ინებეთ is what the other person says while handing you your change, your coffee or your passport, and it is the moment to answer with გმადლობთ. გენაცვალე has no English equivalent at all: it is an affectionate term, warm rather than formal, and you will hear it most from older people speaking to someone younger.

For addressing people, ბატონო and ქალბატონო are used with a first name, so ბატონო გიორგი and ქალბატონო ნინო. ბატონო also works alone, as a polite yes, and as a way of asking someone to repeat themselves.

The mistake that actually gets noticed is the missing -t. გმადლობ to a woman three decades older than you, or to someone serving you, is not a smaller thank you, it is a familiar one, and it lands roughly the way first-naming a stranger lands in English. Nobody will say anything. Everyone will hear it.

The second is using არაფრის as if it meant please or no problem in a general sense. It answers thanks and nothing else. If you say it when someone has not thanked you, you have replied to a line that was never spoken.

The third is reaching for გენაცვალე because it sounds charming. It is affectionate and it normally travels downwards in age, so a visitor using it on an older stranger is not being warm, just odd. And keep მაპატიეთ for things that deserve it. Using it after stepping on a foot sounds theatrical, where ბოდიში is exactly right.

Everything on this page is standard Georgian and works from Batumi to Telavi. What shifts is the flavouring. გენაცვალე and the older softener გეთაყვა are heard more from older speakers and away from central Tbilisi, and among younger people in the capital the plain forms do most of the work.

It is worth knowing that Mingrelian in the west and Svan in the mountains are separate languages rather than accents, not dialects of Georgian. Speakers there also use Georgian, and they use these same phrases, so you do not need a second set of words to be polite in Zugdidi. Beyond that, claims about which region says what tend to be contested, and it is safer to listen than to generalise.

Georgians answer the phone with ალო, which is a borrowing and has no other use. In an office you may also hear გისმენთ, literally I am listening to you, in the polite form. Neither is a greeting, so გამარჯობა comes after the line is open, not instead of it.

In writing the register splits hard. A text to a friend is მადლობა or the Latin-alphabet madloba, which is still very common online and reads as informal. An email opens with ბატონო or ქალბატონო plus the first name, uses გთხოვთ where speech would use თუ შეიძლება, and signs off with პატივისცემით. Georgian has no grammatical gender, so unlike Greek or French nothing about the sign-off changes with the recipient.

Learn გმადლობთ, არაფრის and თუ შეიძლება this week and you can be polite in almost any Georgian transaction, including the half of it that comes back at you. Add უკაცრავად for opening a conversation with a stranger, and keep the -t on everything until someone drops it first.

The rest arrives with context. Listen for which apology people use when, and for who says ინებეთ to whom, and the register sorts itself out faster than any list can teach it.