Romanian Greetings and Who You Can Say Them To

Most people arrive in Romania with one greeting, bună ziua, and use it on everybody. It is a good phrase. It will never offend anyone. But it is the formal register, and said to a friend it sounds the way shaking hands with your flatmate would look.

Romanian splits greetings two ways at once. There is the formal and informal line, which is grammatical and runs through the whole language, and there is the time of day, which decides which formal greeting you reach for. Get both right and you sound like someone who has been there a while. Get the first one wrong and you sound either cold or over-familiar, depending on which way you miss.

A note on the respellings below. Romanian has two vowels, ă and the pair î and â, that English does not have. The ă is close to the vowel in the first syllable of about, and the respellings write it as uh. The î has no English equivalent at all and does not appear in most of these greetings, which is lucky. Treat the respellings as a starting point and correct them against a real voice.

Literally good day. This is the greeting for a shopkeeper, a bus driver, a pharmacist, a landlord, a doctor, a neighbour you have not been introduced to, and anyone visibly older than you. It covers most of the daylight hours and it is the single most useful phrase on this page.

It is a greeting on arrival, not a parting. When you leave the shop you say la revedere, which is the standard formal goodbye, or o zi bună if you want to be warmer about it.

Drop ziua and you drop the formality with it. Bună on its own is the everyday informal hello, used freely between friends, colleagues of the same rank and people of roughly the same age. It is what you text.

Ceau behaves like its Italian source and works at both ends of a meeting. You will see it spelled ceau in Romanian orthography and ciao in messages, and nobody minds either. Salut leans a little younger and a little more masculine in practice, though plenty of women use it. None of these three belong in a government office.

Three formal greetings divide the day, and the boundaries are softer than a timetable but firmer than an English speaker expects.

Bună dimineața has a narrow window. It belongs to the first part of the working morning and sounds odd by lunchtime. Bună ziua then carries you through the middle of the day. Bună seara takes over when the light goes, which in December is the middle of the afternoon and in July is after nine. Watch the sky rather than the clock.

Noapte bună is the one that catches people out, because it looks like the night version of bună dimineața. It is not a hello. It is said on the way out of the door, and walking into a restaurant with it announces that you are leaving.

Romanian has two words for you. Tu is singular and informal. Dumneavoastră is the respectful form, grammatically plural, and it takes plural verb endings even when you are addressing one person. The greeting you pick is really a declaration of which one you are about to use.

So bună ziua sets up dumneavoastră and bună sets up tu, and switching mid-conversation is noticeable. The move from one to the other is usually proposed by the older person or the one in authority, often with a phrase inviting you to speak informally. Wait to be invited.

There is a third form, dumneata, which sits between the two. It is useful to recognise and risky to produce: depending on who says it to whom, it can read as gently old-fashioned or as faintly condescending. Learners are better off with the two clean options.

The greeting usually comes with a question attached, and it is a real question more often than the English equivalent is. The verb ending tells you which register you are in.

If you are in the informal register, the handback is dar tu, pronounced dar too. Having one of these ready matters more than having a wide vocabulary, because the pause after ce faci is where most beginners stall.

The commonest error is one direction only. Learners almost never over-formalise; they under-formalise, because bună is short and easy and the first thing an app teaches. Saying bună to a stranger in their sixties, or to an official behind a desk, is the error that gets quietly registered. Nobody will tell you. The temperature just drops a degree.

The second is noroc. It means luck, it is what you say when glasses are raised, and it also works as a casual hello between men who know each other. In the wrong setting, said to a woman you have just met or to a stranger in an office, it is simply out of place. Keep it for the table and for friends.

The third is să trăiți, literally may you live. It is strongly associated with the military, where it works as both greeting and response, and you will also hear it from or toward older people as a mark of respect. It is not a neutral hello and it sounds strange from a foreigner in a shop.

Everything above works everywhere Romanian is spoken, including the Republic of Moldova. What changes region to region is what gets added. In Transylvania and Banat you will hear servus constantly, a leftover of the long Austro-Hungarian presence, used as both hello and goodbye between people on tu terms. In Bucharest it is understood but marked as northern.

Then there is sărut mâna, I kiss your hand, said by men to women and by children to grandparents, priests and elderly relatives. The hand is usually not actually kissed. Its status is genuinely contested: in some families and some towns it is still ordinary courtesy, while plenty of younger Romanians consider it dated or unwelcome. Recognise it, respond to it, and do not be the foreigner who deploys it on a stranger.

Romanians answer the phone with alo, a bare syllable with a rising tone, often before any greeting at all. It belongs to the phone and nowhere else. Once you know who is calling, the normal greeting follows.

In writing the split is sharp. A message to a friend opens with bună, salut or nothing. A work email, including to people you deal with every week, very commonly opens with bună ziua followed by a comma, which has become the standard neutral email greeting. For a formal letter or a first approach to someone senior, the opening is stimate domnule for a man and stimată doamnă for a woman, the equivalent of Dear Sir and Dear Madam, and the ending changes with gender.

Learn bună ziua, bună and la revedere this week and you can walk into any room in Romania without a misstep. Add bună seara for the evening and ce faci with bine, mulțumesc behind it, and you have both halves of the exchange rather than just the opening.

The rest is listening. Notice which greeting the person behind the counter uses on you, and give them the same one back.