Happy New Year in French: Bonne année

Happy New Year in French is Bonne année !, said "bun ah-NAY", and it is the same from Paris to Brussels and Montreal. Bonne means "good" and année means "year". In writing, the usual partner is Meilleurs vœux, "best wishes", and out loud the classic pairing is Bonne année et bonne santé, "a good year and good health". In France you can go on wishing people a happy new year until 31 January. Below are the phrases, wishes to copy for tu and vous, what bonne année means word by word, how Québec does it differently, and what French films and TV say most at this time of year.

Updated 27 October 2026 · 13 min read

The phrases

Bonne année et bonne santé is the standard long form, and bonne et heureuse année is the more traditional one: a much older wish, bonne et sainte année, was modernised into it in the twentieth century. The joke from Québec has its own section below.

New Year wishes in French, ready to copy

French has two words for "you". Use tu (te, toi) with one person you know well, and vous with anyone you are formal with and with any group, including your own family.

For family

For friends

For colleagues, clients and cards, with vous

Que 2027 t’apporte uses the subjunctive, as wishes beginning with que do. Présenter ses vœux is the set phrase for "offering your wishes", and it is what the formal cards say.

Bonne année, word by word

Bonne is bon, "good", in the feminine, because année is a feminine noun. Said on its own, bon is a nasal vowel with no n heard. Bonne is different: its n is pronounced, and it runs straight into année, so the phrase sounds like "bo-na-NAY". This is not a liaison, the linking of a consonant that is otherwise silent. It is what French calls an enchaînement, a consonant that is always pronounced carrying over to the next vowel. So there is no way to get it wrong by "forgetting the liaison": just say bonne and année without a break.

Année is "year". French has two words for it, an and année, and the dictionaries divide them like this:

• An is the year you count. Ages always use it with a number: il a dix ans, "he is ten". It is also the word in the name of the day: le jour de l’An, le Nouvel An, both with a capital A.
• Année is the year you live through. With an adjective it is always année: dix belles années, never dix beaux ans. Bonne is an adjective, so the wish can only be bonne année.
• Either works with prochain or dernier: l’an prochain and l’année prochaine both mean "next year". Année stresses the passing of time a little more.

The one place bon and an survive together is an idiom: bon an mal an, "taking the good years with the bad", "on average".

Meilleurs vœux, and how to type the œ

Vœux is the plural of vœu, "a wish" (also "a vow"), and it rhymes with deux. In the plural it is the word for the wishes people send for the new year: envoyer ses vœux, "to send your wishes", and la carte de vœux, "the New Year card". It is pronounced "vuh", the x silent.

Meilleurs vœux on its own is an ellipsis of mes meilleurs vœux, "my best wishes". Larousse notes that the short form was once criticised, since meilleur could be read as "better", and calls the criticism weak, but still counts the full mes meilleurs vœux as the more careful of the two. On a card to a client, write mes.

The œ is a ligature, an o and an e joined into one letter. The standard French AZERTY layout supplied with Windows does not have it, so on Windows type Alt + 0156 on the number pad (and Alt + 0140 for the capital Œ). On a Mac with a French keyboard it is Option + O. Many people do not bother, and the subtitles show it: of every vœux in French film and television subtitles, 51% are typed voeux, without the ligature.

When to say it

From midnight on 31 December, and for a good while after. French etiquette allows you to present your wishes until 31 January, so a Bonne année ! to a colleague you have not seen since the holidays is normal well into the month.

The French head of state sets the calendar. Since Charles de Gaulle began it in 1960, les vœux du Président have been a televised address on the evening of 31 December, in which the President of the Republic looks back on the year and sets out his wishes for the next. It is followed by a round of formal vœux in the first three weeks of January, to the diplomatic corps, the institutions of the state, the press and others.

The night and the month after

Le réveillon de la Saint-Sylvestre is the New Year’s Eve party, named after the saint whose day is 31 December. A réveillon is a late-night feast, and the word serves both nights: the Christmas one and this one. The meal often includes foie gras and champagne.

Le gui, mistletoe, is hung for New Year in France, and at midnight people kiss under it. The old cry Au gui l’an neuf !, "To the mistletoe, the new year!", belongs to the same custom.

Les étrennes are New Year gifts, and also the year-end tip: Larousse’s example is donner des étrennes au facteur, “to give the postman his étrennes”, and caretakers and household staff traditionally receive them at this time of year too.

La galette des rois follows on l’Épiphanie, the feast of the Three Kings on 6 January; in France the Church has kept it on the first Sunday after 1 January since 1802. In the northern half of France it is a puff-pastry galette filled with frangipane, almond cream; in the south it is a gâteau des rois, a brioche ring scented with orange-flower water. A fève, once a real bean and since about 1875 usually a little porcelain figure, is baked inside. The youngest person at the table slips underneath it and calls out who gets each slice, so that nobody can choose the slice with the charm. Whoever finds the fève is king or queen for the day and gets la couronne, the paper crown. Eating it is called tirer les rois, "drawing the kings".

Happy New Year in Québec French

Bonne année ! is just as standard in Québec. What differs is everything around it.

Le jour de l’An is New Year’s Day, as in France, and le temps des Fêtes is the whole holiday season. It is traditionally a family day, with large gatherings, traditional music and dancing, and a meal of turkey, pâté à la viande (meat pie), pigs’-feet stew and atocas, cranberries.

La bénédiction paternelle, the father’s blessing: in many families, before the celebrations begin, the eldest child asks the father to bless the family. The custom began in Québec; a campaign in 1935 to spread it to Acadia did not take.

Le Bye Bye, Radio-Canada’s comedy review of the year, goes out on 31 December at 11 pm and ends with a ten-second countdown to midnight. It began in 1968, missed a number of years, and has been back every year since 2010. The 2021 edition was watched by 4,862,000 people, which made it the most-watched programme in the history of Québec television.

Bonne année, grand nez !, "Happy New Year, big nose!", is a joking wish, and the answer is Pareillement, grandes dents !, "Same to you, big teeth!". McGill University’s guide to Québec French calls it a fairly common way of wishing a happy new year. Older variants rhyme too: C’est pareil, grandes oreilles ! ("Same here, big ears!").

The long, traditional wish ends with heaven. In Acadia it is Une bonne et heureuse année et le paradis à la fin de vos jours, "a good and happy year, and paradise at the end of your days", said with a handshake as early as possible on New Year’s Day. The same formula was known in France: the folklorist Paul Sébillot recorded Bonne année, santé, prospérité et le paradis à la fin de vos jours in Lower Brittany in 1887.

In Belgium the tradition is a round of visits to friends and family to wish them a happy new year; children recite their wishes, in verse or prose, to their grandparents or parents and are given a dringuelle, the Belgian word for étrennes, from Flemish drinkgeld.

The countdown

The last ten seconds of the year in French: Dix, neuf, huit, sept, six, cinq, quatre, trois, deux, un… Bonne année ! Said on their own, six and dix end in an s sound, "sees" and "dees". The rest of the numbers, including why 80 is four twenties, are in numbers 1 to 100 in French.

How often do French films say them?

We counted the words of the New Year in French film and television subtitles, about 318 million words of dialogue. The counts are single words, so bonne année as a phrase cannot be counted at all: bonne and année each turn up in thousands of other sentences.

• An beats année, 2.3 times over, but not because of the greeting. Most of it is age: ans is said 6.1 times as often as the singular an, because every j’ai vingt ans counts. That is the dictionary rule at work, a number takes an.
• The réveillon is said far more than the Saint-Sylvestre, but its count includes Christmas Eve as well.
• The galette, its fève and the Épiphanie are each said less than once per million words, and étrennes is the rarest word in the table. Most of these subtitles are translations of English-language films, so a count like this shows what films talk about, not what French families do in January.

Learn the language behind the greeting

The words above are in the most common French words, and the French course, Verbavia (our own course), teaches French from the most common words up, with recordings, a lesson a day, free on the web. For the season before this one, see Merry Christmas in French, and for the greeting in eight other languages, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year in other languages. To put a date on your card, see the days of the week in French.

Sources

• Larousse, Dictionnaire de français: année (souhaiter la bonne année; an and année with numbers, adjectives, prochain and durations), an (le jour de l’An, le Nouvel An with a capital; bon an mal an; au gui l’an neuf), vœu, vœux (envoyer ses vœux; mes meilleurs vœux and the elliptical meilleurs vœux), présenter (présenter ses vœux), souhait (souhaits de bonne année), réveillon (Christmas night or 31 December), Saint-Sylvestre, gui (au gui l’an neuf), étrennes (donner des étrennes au facteur), galette (galette des Rois, tirer les rois), fève and Épiphanie.
• Wiktionnaire: bonne année (pronunciation /bɔ.n‿a.ne/), bon (/bɔ̃/), bonne (/bɔn/), meilleurs vœux, vœu (/vø/), réveillon and bonne année, grand nez (Québec, with the reply).
• Wikipedia (French): Liaison en français (liaison and enchaînement); Jour de l’an (Bonne année, bonne santé and Bonne et heureuse année; the réveillon, foie gras and champagne; the kiss under the mistletoe; étrennes for household staff and caretakers; wishes until 31 January, after Geneviève d’Angenstein, “Cinq règles de bienséance”, Le Parisien, 3 January 2012; Belgium and the dringuelle, and the Québec jour de l’An and bénédiction paternelle, after Sophie Lounguine, Fêtes de Noël & jour de l’an autour du monde, Horay, 2007, pp. 33 and 57); Gui (plante)) (Bonne et sainte année, le paradis à la fin de vos jours, modernised in the twentieth century to Bonne et heureuse année); Vœux présidentiels du 31 décembre en France (de Gaulle from 1960; the January round of vœux); Épiphanie (the first Sunday after 1 January in France since 1802, after Nicolas Senèze, La Croix, 6 January 2016; porcelain figures from about 1875); Galette des rois (frangipane in the northern half of France, gâteau des rois in the south; the youngest under the table; the crown); Folklore acadien (the Acadian wish and the bénédiction paternelle, after Chiasson, Cormier, Deschênes and Labelle, 1993, pp. 660–661); Bye Bye) (31 December at 11 pm on Radio-Canada, the countdown, the years it ran); Œ (keyboard layouts and Alt codes).
• Radio-Canada, “Le Bye bye 2021 est l’émission la plus regardée de l’histoire de la télé québécoise”, 12 January 2022.
• McGill en français, Expressions québécoises (Bonne année, grand nez !, Pareillement, grandes dents ! and le temps des Fêtes).
• Paul-François Sylvestre, “Bonne année, grand nez!”, L’Express (Toronto), 31 December 2018 (the variants; Sébillot’s Breton wish, Revue des Traditions populaires, 1887; the Normandy rhyme; kissing under the mistletoe in France).
• 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 counts are computed by scripts/frequency_bonneannee.py in Verbavia’s repository and printed from its output rather than typed.