Share Love in Your Native Tongue
Comment how to say 'I love you' in your language
Sparked by a video humorously encouraging non-Spanish speakers to say “I want to eat your ass”1 to their beloved as a way to say “I love you,” let’s talk about all the different ways you can say these three little words.
Pranking people into learning bad words in foreign languages is one way to spend your time, but why not use languages to our advantage? Being able to speak in a foreign tongue is a super power!
In college, friends learned how to say “cheers!” in various languages, and at the time I thought that was kind of silly. Beer culture on college campuses and all…
Now that I’ve had the opportunity to visit (and live in) different places around the world, that super power has come in handy. If you don’t know the story of how Ryan and I learned Dutch in a bar in Belgium, I’ll share it with you some day. Being able to speak the local language is powerful. Even if it’s precious few words like “cheers” or “I love you.”
I asked Chat GPT to tell me how to say these phrases in all the languages it knows, but it only returned 26 languages. That seems rather limiting2, given that there are over 7000 languages spoken on this planet.
So over on “the apps,” I’ve asked my followers to tell me how to say I love you in their native languages. So far, we have the following:
Dutch (specifically, Dialect Midden-Limburg): Ich haoj van dich
Xhosa: Ndiyakuthanda
Bengali: Ami tomake bhalobashi
Yoruba: Mo fęràn ę (Google translate says this is “I like it)
And here’s where you get to jump in. If you speak a language other than English or Spanish,3 share in the comments how to say these phrases in your native tongue.
Let’s start a global love map here on Substack!
Totally valid way to say “I love you” without using those words, especially if one has consent to do so
Evidence, as my guest Theresa pointed out, that we need more diversity in programming
Spanish: te quiero or te amo