Our international languages correspondent Phil Ascough presents a handy cut-out-and-keep guide to seeing in the new year wherever you may be.
As a truly international city you can be sure that Hull itself has a wide selection of nationalities across its population, and some countries speak more than one language. And then there are dialects, spoken by specific groups of people and guaranteed to bamboozle. Not to be confused with accents – which give us rerd instead of road and sner instead of snow – dialects throw up local names for things which have a completely different label elsewhere, or names for things that don’t even exist elsewhere. In Hull an alleyway will always be a tenfoot. A pattie butty doesn’t exist at all outside our corner of the world.
Ethnologue, a website which styles itself as the go-to source for language research, reckons there are more than 7,000 in total. It adds that the number is constantly changing because we are learning more about them all the time, and that 44% of languages are endangered, with fewer than 1,000 users remaining. The same source says that the world’s 20 largest languages are the native tongue of more than 3.7 billion people. That’s a lot, but with a worldwide population of over 8 billion it’s clear that many more languages are in regular use.
AaGlobal Language Services, which was set up more than 30 years ago and has operated in Hull since 2011, offers interpreting and translation in over 500 languages and dialects and has 15,000 linguists around the world. We asked them to help us out with a list of New Year greetings from around the world and Agata Maciejewska, the company’s Translations Department Manager, was happy to oblige.
Many people will be delighted to know that Kiribati in the middle of the Pacific Ocean will be the first nation to see in 2026 and the people there will do it in English. The Commonwealth nation is 12 hours ahead of GMT so they’ll be lighting the fireworks before we’ve even finished lunch.
An hour behind Kiribati is Samoa, where the locals are likely to wish you a happy New Year in their own language with a hearty “manuia le tausaga fou!”
Beijing, the capital of China, clocks in at GMT plus eight hours. The Chinese New Year is based on the lunar calendar and in 2026 will fall on Tuesday 17 February with huge celebrations worldwide to welcome the Year of the Horse. The Gregorian New Year on 1st January is also celebrated in China but with rather less intensity. The greeting is written as 新年快乐 and is pronounced xin nian kuai le.
New Delhi, capital of India and home to nearly 34.7m people according to the World Population Review, is five and half hours ahead of GMT and its Hindi greeting to celebrate the New Year is नए साल की शुभकामनाएँ or, in conversation, naye saal ki shubhkamnaye.
Dubai, likely to be a popular destination for many Brits seeking a warm weather New Year celebration, is four hours ahead of GMT. Their Arabic New Year greeting is كل عام وأنتم بخير! spoken as kul a’am wa antom bekhair.
South Africa is two hours ahead of the UK and will celebrate the arrival of 2026 in the Xhosa language with halala kulonyaka omtsha noNyaka omtsha ozele lithamsanqa.
Warsaw is one hour ahead and is an easy translation for Agata, who comes from Poland. She wishes us all Szczęśliwego Nowego Roku!
Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, is two hours behind the UK. Part of the Kingdom of Denmark, Greenland is the largest island in the world. The official Denmark website says Greenland has about 56,000 inhabitants who “mostly live in the 20% of the country that is not covered by ice and snow”. Let’s wish them ukiortaami pilluarit in Kalaallisut, the official Greenlandic language.
Further south we find 30 or more nations where the language is linked back to the days of colonialism.
Brazil, three hours behind the UK, delivers its Feliz Ano Novo! New Year greeting in Portuguese and Suriname, also three hours behind, is Dutch speaking with gelukkiege nuwe jaar. Costa Rica in Central America sits six hours behind the UK and its feliz año nuevo is Spanish.
The USA and Canada span eight time zones from Newfoundland – three and a half hours behind GMT – through the Atlantic, Eastern, Central, Mountain and Pacific to Alaska. English is the official language except in Canada, where that status is shared with French. So bonne année!
And then there’s Hawaii which, at 10 hours behind GMT brings us almost back to where we started. The distance from Honolulu to Kiribati is about 2,500 miles but Niue is even closer. At 11 hours behind the UK, Niue is one of the last inhabited places to see in the New Year – yet the distance from our starting point is only 1,700 miles. That’s less than the distance from Leeds to Tenerife, but if you’re minded to jump on a flight from Kiribati to Niue for two New Years in one day and a monuina e tau foou welcome – similar to Samoa’s – you’d better charter a plane and fly direct. Regular routes from Niue take you via Fiji and New Zealand and generally take at least 24 hours.