Hello & goodbye ranked: ciao vs salve, oi vs olá

Italian says ciao about three times as often as salve. Brazil says oi slightly more than olá, while Portugal says olá 23 times as often as oi. French salut is narrowly ahead of bonjour. And Spanish hola is the most-said hello of the eight languages we counted, at 1,421 per million words of film and television subtitles, which makes it the 88th most common word in Spanish dialogue. In all eight, hello is said more often than goodbye.

Updated 15 October 2026 · 8 min read

Hello in eight languages, ranked

Each bar is the everyday hello a phrasebook gives for that language.

The full count, with every other everyday hello we could count as a single word:

Every figure is the number of times the word is said per million words of subtitles. Three things stand out.

Spanish says hello most. Hola is said 2.9 times as often as French bonjour. Part of that is the count: French splits its greeting between bonjour, salut and bonsoir, and Spanish hola works at any hour and with anyone.

English and German say hey more than hello. Hey is in the table because it is how people greet each other on screen, but it is also a call for attention, so its count is not all greetings. German subtitles use hey and hi as well as hallo; they are English loans, like the fourteen others we counted in German, French and Spanish.

Mandarin's 嘿 and 嗨 are borrowed sounds. 嘿 (hēi) and 嗨 (hāi) write English hey and hi. The standard greeting is 你好 (nǐ hǎo), counted here with the polite 您好 and the plural 你们好.

Ciao vs salve

Ciao is said 912.1 times per million words and salve 272.7: 3.3 to one. The comparison flatters ciao, because ciao is also goodbye. Treccani's dictionary defines it as a friendly greeting said "on meeting or on parting" to people you address as tu, and traces it to a Venetian phrase meaning "(I am your) slave". Salve is a greeting only; Treccani derives it from the Latin for "be well".

So the two are not rivals for the same job. Ciao is for friends, family and anyone you are on first-name terms with. Salve and buongiorno (169.4 per million) are for everyone else, and between them they are said less than half as often as ciao. Film dialogue is mostly people who know each other.

Oi vs olá

Portuguese is the clearest split in the table, and it runs along the Atlantic.

In Brazilian subtitles oi leads olá, but only just. In European Portuguese subtitles olá is said 23 times as often as oi. Goodbye splits the same way: Brazil says tchau slightly more than adeus, and Portugal says adeus 13 times as often as tchau. Priberam's dictionary marks oi as an informal greeting and labels its other uses Brazilian, and gives tchau as an informal goodbye taken from Italian ciao.

If you are learning Brazilian Portuguese, oi and tchau are the pair to use with friends. In Portugal, olá and adeus. More of the differences between the two are in Brazilian vs European Portuguese.

Salut vs bonjour

Salut (505.9) is just ahead of bonjour (491.2). Like ciao, it has a head start: Le Robert labels it familier and defines it as a short formula "of welcome or of farewell", so some of those are goodbyes. Add bonsoir (113.1), the evening greeting, to bonjour and the polite pair is ahead again.

The practical rule is the same as in Italian. Salut is for people you would call tu. Bonjour is for everyone, and it is what you say on walking into a shop. Which of tu and vous French films use more is counted in formal vs informal you.

Goodbye, ranked

Two of these are ceilings. French au revoir is counted through revoir, which is also the verb "to see again"; German auf Wiedersehen through Wiedersehen, which is also a reunion. A word list holds single words, so it cannot tell au revoir from je veux te revoir.

Even with that help, goodbye loses everywhere. The everyday hello is said 3.9 times as often as the commonest goodbye in Spanish, 4.0 times in Portugal, 3.6 in Brazil, 5.0 in German, 2.7 in English, 2.0 in Mandarin and at least 1.8 in French. Italian is left out of that list, because ciao is both. A count cannot say why. One plausible reason is that a scene has to open with people meeting, and can simply cut away when they part.

Spanish chao and chau are the same Italian word again: the Real Academia's dictionary derives chao from Italian ciao and labels it colloquial. In these subtitles it is rare beside adiós.

Hello on the phone

Several languages keep a separate word for answering the phone.

Italian pronto is a ceiling, because it is also the ordinary word for "ready". Mandarin 喂 is said wéi for "hello?" on the phone and wèi for "hey".

What we could not count

The lists hold single words, so greetings made of two words are missing from every table above: Spanish buenos días and hasta luego, Portuguese bom dia and boa noite, German guten Tag and guten Morgen, Italian buona sera written as two words, French bonne journée. Spanish buenas is in the hello table as a ceiling for that reason: it is both the casual "hi" and half of buenas noches.

Two more limits apply to every figure here. Most subtitles in every language except English are translations of English-language films, and the lists do not record which. And subtitles are written to be read, so they are tidier than speech.

Esperanto is not in the tables because its subtitle corpus is only 403,882 words, too few to compare.

Which hello should a learner use?

Learn the informal one first, because it is the one you will hear most, and the polite one alongside it, because it is the one you will need with strangers:

• Spanish: hola for everyone. It is word one of the most common Spanish words.
• Italian: ciao with friends, buongiorno or salve with everyone else. Italian word list.
• French: salut with friends, bonjour with everyone else. French word list.
• Portuguese: oi in Brazil, olá in Portugal. Portuguese word list.
• German: hallo nearly everywhere. German word list.
• Mandarin: 你好, and 您好 to someone older or senior. Mandarin word list.

Verbavia (our own course) teaches each language from a frequency list like these, free on the web. The words that follow hello are counted in which language says thank you most and OK in other languages. For two languages that are not in these corpora at all, see hello and thank you in Shanghainese and Māori greetings.

The seasonal greetings are in Merry Christmas and Happy New Year in 9 languages, with a count of how often films say Christmas in each.

Each language's greetings have a page of their own, with pronunciation and when to use each: Italian, German and Portuguese.

Sources

• Treccani, Vocabolario on line: ciao (a friendly greeting on meeting or parting, to those addressed as tu; from Venetian s-ciavo, "(I am your) slave"); salve (a formula of greeting, from the Latin imperative of salvere, "to be well").
• Priberam, Dicionário da Língua Portuguesa: oi (informal greeting; further uses marked Brazil); tchau (informal goodbye, from Italian ciao).
• Le Robert, Dictionnaire en ligne: salut (familier: a short formula of welcome or of farewell).
• Real Academia Española, Diccionario de la lengua española: chao (from Italian ciao; colloquial "goodbye").
• CC-CEDICT, entries 喂 (wéi, hello when answering the phone; wèi, hey) and 拜拜 (loanword, bye-bye). cc-cedict.org
• 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. Every count is computed by scripts/frequency_screen.py and printed from its output rather than typed: each word's count, with the spellings listed in the tables added up, divided by the total of all counts in that language's list.