Happy birthday in different languages: 36 of them

Happy birthday in different languages is often not "happy birthday" at all. German wishes you alles Gute, "everything good"; Portuguese says parabéns, "congratulations"; Polish says sto lat, "a hundred years"; and Greek says chrónia pollá, "many years". Below are the wishes in 36 languages, with how to say them and what the words mean, then a count of which wish films and television actually use, made by reading every line of eight subtitle collections, 441 million lines in English alone. Last comes the birthday song in other languages.

Updated 5 November 2026 · 14 min read

How to say happy birthday in different languages

First ten of the languages Verbavia teaches, each with a guide to saying it:

A few notes on saying them:

• Spanish: the ñ of cumpleaños is the ny of "canyon". Feliz cumple is the casual one, among friends.
• French: the x of joyeux is sounded as a z before the vowel of anniversaire: "zhwah-yuh-zah-nee". Bon joins up the same way, "boh-nah-nee". In Canada and Switzerland bonne fête is also "happy birthday"; in France it is a happy name day.
• Italian: buon compleanno is "good birthday", and tanti auguri, "many wishes", is the first line of the Italian song. Hold the double n of compleanno a moment longer.
• Portuguese: parabéns means "congratulations", and Wiktionary gives "happy birthday!" as its first sense. Feliz aniversário is just as correct; which one films use more is counted below.
• German: Geburtstag is Geburt, birth, and Tag, day, joined by an -s-. The w of Glückwunsch is said as a v, and the ü with rounded lips.
• Mandarin and Shanghainese write the wish with the same four characters and read them in their own sounds. The Shanghainese for "I wish you…" swaps in 侬 (non) for Mandarin 你. Both are on happy birthday in Shanghainese, and other wishes, beside Cantonese.
• Māori: rā whānau is both "birthday" and "happy birthday". Both Māori wishes, the Rā Whānau song line by line and what to write in a card are on happy birthday in Māori.
• Esperanto: the -n on both words is there because the wish is the object of an unsaid "I wish you".

Verbavia also teaches Samoan, Tok Pisin, Fijian, Marshallese, Kiribati and Rapa Nui. They are not in the table, because no dictionary or other source we could find gives the birthday wish in them, and a guessed wish is worse than none. Wiktionary has the Fijian word for birthday, siga ni sucu, but not the wish. Hawaiian, a Polynesian language like Māori, is in the next table.

Happy birthday in the most spoken languages

The world's most spoken languages, in the order of the most spoken languages, then a few more that wish birthdays in a way of their own. Romanisations are Wiktionary's.

Four ways to wish someone a happy birthday

Set side by side, the wishes say one of four things.

Happy birthday. Many languages put "happy" (or "joyful", or "good") next to the word for birthday: Spanish, French, Mandarin, Bengali, Arabic's ʕīd mīlād saʕīd, Hebrew, Swahili. English does it too.

Congratulations. In seven of the wishes here, the key word is the one for congratulations: Portuguese parabéns, German herzlichen Glückwunsch, Japanese omedetō, Korean chukha, Russian pozdravljáju, Dutch gefeliciteerd and Swedish grattis.

Many years. Six wish you more years rather than a happy day: Polish sto lat, "a hundred years"; Greek chrónia pollá and Romanian la mulți ani, "many years"; Catalan per molts anys, "for many years"; Hebrew ʿad meá v'esrím, "until 120"; and Arabic kullu ʕāmin wa-ʔantum bi-ḵayrin, "every year, and you well". Greek, Romanian and Arabic use the same words at New Year.

Best wishes. And three send good wishes in general: German alles Gute zum Geburtstag, "everything good for the birthday"; Polish wszystkiego najlepszego, "all the best"; and Italian tanti auguri, "many wishes".

The word for birthday splits two ways as well. In German, Mandarin, Japanese, Hindi, Bengali, Esperanto and Swahili it is built from "birth" and "day". In Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, Indonesian and Urdu it is built from "year": Spanish cumpleaños is the day you "fulfil years", Indonesian ulang tahun is "repeat year", Urdu sālgirah is "year knot", and French anniversaire is from the Latin for "the year turning". That is why the French, Portuguese, Indonesian and Urdu words also mean "anniversary".

How often do films say "birthday"?

We counted the word for birthday in film and television subtitles in seven languages, with Portuguese counted separately for Brazil and Portugal.

Each figure is how many times the word is said per million words of subtitles. The spread is narrow, from 87.0 per million in Portuguese (Portugal) to 115.0 in Portuguese (Brazil): in every one of these languages, a birthday comes up about once in every ten thousand words of dialogue. Most of these subtitles are translations of the same English-language films and series, so the birthday episodes are the same episodes in every language.

Two of the counts are generous, and German needed help. French anniversaire and Portuguese aniversário also mean any anniversary: in French subtitles, 2% of anniversaire is followed by de mariage, a wedding anniversary. German builds compounds, so Geburtstagsparty and Geburtstagskind (the birthday boy or girl) are words of their own; they are counted with Geburtstag here, and make up 25% of the German total. Mandarin is counted the same way, with every word that contains 生日.

Joyeux or bon anniversaire? Which wish films use

A word list holds single words, so it cannot tell joyeux anniversaire from bon anniversaire. For the wishes, we read the subtitles themselves: the OpenSubtitles text of each language, line by line, from 16 million lines of Mandarin to 441 million of English, counting each line once even where the same film was uploaded several times.

Each figure is a number of subtitle lines. The corpora differ in size, so compare the wishes within a row, not across rows.

Joyeux beats bon. French subtitles say joyeux anniversaire 1.9 times as often as bon anniversaire. Both are right, and Wiktionary lists them as synonyms: joyeux is "joyful", bon is "good".

Buon compleanno beats tanti auguri. Italian subtitles say buon compleanno 1.8 times as often as tanti auguri, even though tanti auguri covers more than birthdays: 159 times the auguri are di Natale, for Christmas. 1,514 of the tanti auguri are followed by a te: that is the song.

German subtitles say happy birthday in English. The English happy birthday turns up 1,370 times in German subtitles, more than alles Gute zum Geburtstag (1,113). Some of it may be the song, sung in English, and a count cannot tell the two apart. Of the German wishes, alles Gute zum Geburtstag is said 4.4 times as often as herzlichen Glückwunsch zum Geburtstag.

Portuguese says parabéns. Parabéns is said 4.3 times as often as feliz aniversário in Brazil, and 5.8 times as often in Portugal. That is a ceiling, because parabéns is also "congratulations" for anything: 4,691 of the Brazilian ones are parabéns pelo or pela, congratulations on something. The song splits the two countries. Where subtitles sing parabéns to você, Brazil's say parabéns pra você or para você 78% of the time; Portugal's do so 11% of the time, and keep parabéns a você, the words as they were written.

Spanish says feliz cumpleaños, in full. Feliz cumple is in Wiktionary as the casual form, but subtitles hardly use it: 66 times, against 17,059 for feliz cumpleaños.

Mandarin wishes with 祝你. 26% of 生日快乐 comes straight after 祝你 or 祝您, "(I) wish you", as in the song.

About a quarter of all birthday talk is the wish. In the four languages whose wish contains the birthday word itself, the share of every mention of a birthday that is somebody wishing a happy one comes out close: 29% in Mandarin, 27% in English, 25% in French and 24% in Spanish. The rest is talk about birthdays. English many happy returns is rare beside happy birthday, which is said 69 times as often.

The birthday song in other languages

The tune is the same everywhere: it comes from "Good Morning to All", published by the sisters Mildred and Patty Hill in 1893, and the words were translated into many languages. Wikipedia in each language describes its own version.

• Spanish: the song is Cumpleaños feliz, with the words of the wish the other way round. In the Dominican Republic the traditional song is a different one, Celebro tu cumpleaños, written in 1958 by Ramón Rafael Casado Soler.
• French: Joyeux anniversaire, sung four times, with the name added in the third line; in Canada, Bonne fête.
• Italian: Tanti auguri a te, "many wishes to you", with the name in the third line.
• German: the widespread German version begins Zum Geburtstag viel Glück, "for the birthday, lots of luck".
• Mandarin: 祝你生日快乐 (zhù nǐ shēngrì kuàilè), "wishing you a happy birthday", sung four times.
• Portuguese: Parabéns a você, "congratulations to you". Its words are not a translation: they were written in 1942 by Bertha Celeste Homem de Mello, who won a contest run on Rádio Tupi in Rio de Janeiro for words to fit the tune. In Brazil it is popularly sung parabéns pra você, and after it comes a chant of its own: É pique, é pique… é hora, é hora… rá-tim-bum!, then the birthday person's name.
• Māori: Rā whānau ki a koe, set out line by line, with the Ministry of Education's version and Te Aka's, on happy birthday in Māori.

Learn the language behind the wish

A birthday wish is a good first sentence and a poor last one. Verbavia (our own course) teaches 9 languages from the most common words up, a lesson a day, free on the web: Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, German, Mandarin, Esperanto, Shanghainese and te reo Māori. The birthday word is in every one of their word lists: cumpleaños in the Spanish list, anniversaire in the French, 生日 in the Mandarin.

The other wishes of the year are on their own pages: Merry Christmas and Happy New Year in 9 languages and Happy Halloween in other languages. The everyday greetings are counted the same way in hello and goodbye, ranked and which language says thank you most.

Sources

• Wiktionary, the translation table of happy birthday (revision 94587364, read on 5 November 2026): every wish in both tables is in it, with the romanisations, apart from tanti auguri (from the Italian Wikipedia and Wiktionary's auguri), hari huritau (Te Aka) and 祝侬生日快乐 (Verbavia's Shanghainese list). Its Wu entry gives 生日快乐 as Shanghainese.
• Wiktionary entries for pronunciation and meaning. Spanish: feliz cumpleaños, cumpleaños; French: joyeux anniversaire, bon anniversaire, bonne fête, anniversaire; Italian: buon compleanno, compleanno, auguri, augurio; Portuguese: feliz aniversário, aniversário, parabéns; German: alles Gute zum Geburtstag, Geburtstag, Geburt, Glückwunsch, herzlich; Chinese: 生日快樂, 快樂, 祝; Esperanto: naskiĝtago, feliĉa; Palauan: cheroll; Hawaiian: lā hānau; Fijian: sucu (siga ni sucu, birthday).
• Wiktionary entries for what the other wishes say: many happy returns, जन्मदिन, मुबारक, عيد, ميلاد, سعيد, كل عام وأنتم بخير, كل, عام, بخير, শুভ, জন্মদিন, ulang tahun, سالگرہ, с днём рождения, поздравлять, 誕生日, おめでとう, 誕生日おめでとう, 축하, chúc mừng sinh nhật, sinh nhật, heri, siku, kuzaliwa, maligaya, sto lat, wszystkiego najlepszego, χρόνια πολλά, la mulți ani, per molts anys, gefeliciteerd, grattis.
• Te Aka Māori Dictionary: rā whānau and hari huritau, as on happy birthday in Māori.
• The Shanghainese readings are from Verbavia's Shanghainese word list, character by character: 生日 san nyih, 快乐 khua loh, 祝 tsoh, 侬 non. The Palauan -em, "your", is from Verbavia's Palauan course.
• Wikipedia, on the song: Happy Birthday to You, Cumpleaños feliz (Spanish), Joyeux Anniversaire (French), Tanti auguri a te (Italian), Happy Birthday to You (German), 祝你生日快乐 (Chinese), Parabéns a Você (Portuguese).
• Lison, P. & Tiedemann, J. (2016). OpenSubtitles2016: Extracting Large Parallel Corpora from Movie and TV Subtitles. Proceedings of LREC 2016. aclanthology.org
• Dave, H. FrequencyWords: frequency lists from OpenSubtitles 2018, content licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. github.com. The word counts.
• OPUS, OpenSubtitles v2018 monolingual text, read line by line for the wishes: English, Spanish, French, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, European Portuguese, German and Mandarin. Every figure is computed by scripts/frequency_birthday.py and printed from its output rather than typed.