Merry Christmas and Happy New Year in 9 languages

Merry Christmas is Feliz Navidad in Spanish, Joyeux Noël in French, Buon Natale in Italian, Feliz Natal in Portuguese, Frohe Weihnachten in German and 圣诞快乐 (shèngdàn kuàilè) in Mandarin. Below are both greetings in nine languages with how to say them, what to write in a card, and a count of how often films and television actually say "Christmas" in each language.

Updated 16 October 2026 · 7 min read

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, with pronunciation

A few notes on saying them:

• Spanish: the v of Navidad is soft, close to a b, and the final d is barely sounded. Año has the ny of "canyon"; without the mark over the n, ano is a different and unfortunate word.
• French: the two dots on Noël mean the o and the e are said separately: "noh-EL". The x of Joyeux is silent.
• Italian: Buon anno needs its double n held a moment longer, for the same reason as the Spanish.
• Portuguese: Natal ends in a sound like the ow of "cow" in Brazil. In Portugal the final l is a dark l, "nah-TAHL".
• German: W is said as v, ei as "eye", and the ch of Weihnachten is the rasp of Scottish loch.
• Mandarin: the marks are tones; both greetings end in 快乐 (kuàilè), "happy", which is two falling tones.
• Shanghainese writes both greetings with the same characters as Mandarin and reads them in its own sounds.

What each one means

Most of these say the same two things, "happy" and "Christmas", in the local order.

• Feliz Navidad and Feliz Natal: "happy Nativity". Navidad and Natal, like Italian Natale, come from the Latin for "birth".
• Joyeux Noël: "joyful Christmas".
• Buon Natale: "good Christmas". Italian wishes you a good one, not a happy one, and does the same at New Year: Buon anno, "good year".
• Frohe Weihnachten: "glad Christmas". Weihnachten is literally "holy nights".
• Feliĉan Kristnaskon: "happy Christ-birth". The -n endings are there because it is short for "I wish you a happy Christmas".
• Meri Kirihimete is "Merry Christmas" borrowed into Māori sounds. Ngā mihi o te tau hou is "greetings of the new year".
• 圣诞快乐: 圣诞 is "holy birth" and 快乐 is "happy". 新年快乐 is "new year happy".

Mandarin 新年快乐 is for 1 January. The Lunar New Year, which in 2027 falls on 6 February, has greetings of its own: see Chinese New Year greetings in Mandarin, Cantonese and Shanghainese.

One greeting for the whole season

Each language also has a "happy holidays" that covers Christmas and New Year together, useful in a card or an email when you do not know what someone celebrates:

German has a second New Year wish that is only said before midnight: Guten Rutsch!, literally "a good slide" into the new year. After midnight it is Frohes neues Jahr. Italian has an all-purpose one, Auguri!, "best wishes", which works for Christmas, New Year and birthdays alike.

How often do films say "Christmas"?

We counted the word for Christmas 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. European Portuguese says it most, at 138.6 per million, and German least, at 66.3. Some of the counts are a little generous, for the reason given in the last column: Italian natale and Portuguese natal are also the ordinary word for "native", as in "home town".

Two things keep this from being a league table of who loves Christmas most. Most subtitles in every language except English are translations of English-language films, so what is being counted is largely the same Christmas films, translated. And German loses out partly through its own grammar: it builds compounds, so Weihnachtsmann (Father Christmas), Weihnachtsbaum (Christmas tree) and Weihnachtsgeschenk (Christmas present) are each a separate word, counted separately, where French says de Noël and counts Noël every time.

Mandarin is the one language where the whole greeting can be counted, because subtitles treat it as a single word. 圣诞快乐, "Merry Christmas", is said 15.4 times per million words, and 新年快乐, "Happy New Year", 6.1: Christmas wishes outnumber New Year wishes 2.5 to one on screen. In English the nearest thing is the word merry, which is rare outside the greeting, at 23.7 per million.

Esperanto and Māori are not in the chart. The Esperanto subtitle collection is only 403,882 words, in which Kristnaskon appears 23 times, too few to compare; and there is no Māori or Shanghainese collection at all.

Writing it in a card

• Capital letters: Spanish Navidad, French Noël, Italian Natale and Portuguese Natal take a capital. German capitalises every noun, so Weihnachten and Jahr do too. The adjectives do not, apart from the first word.
• Both at once: Feliz Navidad y próspero Año Nuevo (Spanish), Joyeux Noël et bonne année (French), Buon Natale e felice anno nuovo (Italian), Feliz Natal e próspero Ano Novo (Portuguese), Frohe Weihnachten und ein gutes neues Jahr (German).
• To more than one person nothing changes: none of these greetings has a plural form to worry about.

Learn the language behind the greeting

A greeting 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 everyday greetings are counted the same way in hello and goodbye, ranked and which language says thank you most. For Māori greetings beyond Christmas, see Māori greetings.

Christmas, birthdays, toasts and weddings in Shanghainese, beside Mandarin and Cantonese, are on happy birthday in Shanghainese, and other wishes.

The autumn festival has its own page: Happy Halloween in other languages, with trick or treat in each and the words for Día de los Muertos.

Sources

• Te Aka Māori Dictionary: Kirihimete and Meri Kirihimete.
• Wiktionary: 聖誕快樂 and 新年快樂 (pinyin), and 聖誕 (圣诞 as a Shanghainese word). The Shanghainese is written in the romanisation of Verbavia's Shanghainese course, character by character.
• 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_reference.py and printed from its output rather than typed.