Georgian words that actually help

The alphabet is the real barrier, not the grammar

Most travellers who worry about “the language” in Georgia are actually worried about the wrong thing. The grammar is genuinely complicated — Georgian belongs to the Kartvelian language family, unrelated to English, Russian or any Indo-European language, and its verbs conjugate in ways that have little overlap with anything a European speaker already knows. But you are not going to learn Georgian grammar on a two-week trip, and nobody expects you to. What actually slows a visitor down, day to day, is the alphabet: mkhedruli, a 33-letter script with no relative among the world’s other writing systems, used for every street sign, menu and shop front outside the most tourist-facing strips.

The good news is that mkhedruli is entirely phonetic — every letter makes one sound, consistently, unlike English spelling — so once you can recognise a handful of shapes, sounding out a word becomes possible even without understanding it. Learning to read just enough to match a bus destination sign against what you’re expecting, or to spot the word for “closed” (დაკეტილია) on a shop door, pays off disproportionately for the small effort it takes. A phrasebook app with a camera-translation feature does the heavy lifting for anything longer, such as a restaurant menu with no English version.

Old Tbilisi Private Walking Tour and Cable Car is a practical way to pick up some of this by ear rather than from a book — a private guide through the old town naturally points out street names, shop signs and the odd useful phrase as you go, alongside the history.

Greetings and basic courtesy

A short list that covers the vast majority of everyday interaction:

• Gamarjoba (გამარჯობა) — hello. Formal enough for any situation, and the one word every visitor should have automatically by day two.
• Nakhvamdis (ნახვამდის) — goodbye, formal. Chao works informally, borrowed from Italian via Russian and understood everywhere.
• Madloba (მადლობა) — thank you, said constantly in daily life. Gmadlobt is the more formal version.
• Diakh (დიახ) — yes, formal; ki (კი) is the everyday version you’ll hear far more often.
• Ara (არა) — no.
• Ukatsravad (უკაცრავად) — excuse me / sorry, useful for getting past someone in a crowded market or interrupting politely.
• Ar mesmis (არ მესმის) — I don’t understand, a genuinely useful phrase to have ready rather than nodding along and hoping.

None of these require getting the pronunciation exactly right to land well. Georgians are, by wide reputation and in most visitors’ direct experience, generous about a foreigner’s effort with the language, and a mangled “gamarjoba” gets a warmer response than English spoken at volume in the hope that repetition helps.

Numbers, for markets and taxis

Georgian numbers use a base-20 counting system in places, similar in logic to French’s soixante-dix and quatre-vingts, which makes anything above twenty genuinely awkward to build on the fly. For practical purposes — haggling gently at Dezerter Bazaar, confirming a price with a marchroutka driver, or checking a number on a bill — it is worth memorising one to ten and the round numbers (ten, twenty, fifty, hundred) rather than attempting the full system:

erti (1), ori (2), sami (3), otkhi (4), khuti (5), ekvsi (6), shvidi (7), rva (8), tskhra (9), ati (10), oci (20), ormotsdaati (50, literally “two-twenties-and-ten”), asi (100).

In practice, most vendors dealing with tourists will show a number on a calculator or their phone if a spoken figure isn’t landing, so this is a nice-to-have rather than essential — but it does help with the specific situation of confirming you heard a marchroutka fare correctly before you hand over cash, which ties into the wider advice in Scams, overcharging and minor annoyances.

Food words that make ordering easier

This is where a little vocabulary pays off the most, since Georgian menus outside tourist restaurants are not always translated, and knowing a handful of dish names avoids pointing at random or ordering the same three things every night.

• Khinkali (ხინკალი) — the dumplings; specify khortsit (with meat), kartofilit (with potato), or khachos (with cheese). Full guide: Khinkali: how to order and how to eat them.
• Khachapuri (ხაჭაპური) — cheese bread, with regional versions worth knowing by name; see Every kind of khachapuri, region by region.
• Ghvino (ღვინო) — wine. Tsiteli ghvino is red, tetri ghvino is white or amber depending on the maker.
• Puri (პური) — bread, offered with almost every meal by default.
• Ლუდი / ludi — beer, if you’d rather steer away from the wine list.
• Angarishi, tu sheidzleba (ანგარიში, თუ შეიძლება) — the bill, please. See Restaurant etiquette, service charges and tipping for what to expect when it arrives.

a hands-on khinkali and khachapuri cooking class is one of the more effective, low-pressure ways to pick up food vocabulary — you learn the words for dough, filling and fold technique because you’re using them with your hands, which sticks better than a phrasebook column. It pairs naturally with the broader Cooking classes in Tbilisi: what you actually learn guide if you want to compare formats before booking.

Supra vocabulary: toasts and hospitality

A Georgian supra — the elaborate, toast-led feast that anchors Georgian hospitality — runs on its own small vocabulary that’s worth knowing if you’re invited to one, whether formally through a wine tour or informally by a guesthouse host.

• Gaumarjos (გაუმარჯოს) — the standard toast, “to victory” in spirit rather than literal translation.
• Tamada (თამადა) — the toastmaster who leads the sequence of toasts and decides when the table drinks. Following the tamada’s lead matters more than knowing every word said.
• Sakhli (სახლი) — home, often invoked in toasts to family and hospitality.
• Sakartvelo (საქართველო) — Georgia’s name for itself, worth recognising since it appears constantly on signage, from government buildings to wine labels.

Declining a toast entirely is unusual at a formal supra but not impossible — a small sip rather than draining the glass is an accepted middle ground if you’re pacing yourself through a long evening, and saying so plainly (rather than pretending to drink) is respected more than you might expect.

Transport and directions

• Sad aris…? (სად არის?) — where is…?
• Marjvniv / Marckhniv — right / left.
• Pirdapir (პირდაპირ) — straight ahead.
• Gaacheret (გააჩერეთ) — stop (useful in a marchroutka or taxi when you’ve reached your point, since not every route has a formal stop announced).
• Metro works as a loanword and is understood without translation; see How marshrutkas actually work for the wider transport vocabulary you’ll encounter on minibus destination boards, which are written in mkhedruli with no transliteration.

Destination names on marchroutka windscreens are the single most common place a visitor actually needs to read mkhedruli in real time, since drivers rarely speak English and the board is the only confirmation you’re getting on the right bus before it leaves.

Russian, English, and who speaks what

English is the working second language among Georgians under roughly 35, especially in Tbilisi’s hospitality industry, and is the safer default to lead with — both because it is now more widely understood by younger staff and because, given the recent political history between Georgia and Russia, some Georgians (though by no means all) would rather not be addressed in Russian by a foreign visitor.

Older Georgians, particularly outside Tbilisi, are more likely to have functional Russian from the Soviet-era education system than English, so in a rural guesthouse or with an older taxi driver, a few Russian words can occasionally bridge a gap that English doesn’t. Neither is essential — pointing, a translation app, and the food vocabulary above cover the great majority of situations a visitor actually runs into.

Authentic and Secret Tbilisi Private Tour Price for 1 to 3 People is worth considering specifically if a language gap is what’s holding you back from exploring beyond the obvious sights — a private, English-speaking local guide removes the barrier entirely for a day, including in neighbourhoods where signage is Georgian-only.

Reading a menu without full vocabulary

Even without memorising food words, a practical trick works in most Tbilisi restaurants: photograph the menu, or a difficult sign, with a phone translation app’s camera function, which handles mkhedruli reasonably well for print text (handwritten specials boards are less reliable). Staff in tourist-frequented restaurants are also used to this and will often point out a recommended dish in English if you look uncertain, rather than let you order at random.

Place names: why they’re harder to pronounce than they look

Georgian place names are where the language’s famous consonant clusters show up most visibly for a visitor, since you’ll be saying them — to a taxi driver, a marchroutka conductor, a hotel receptionist — far more often than any other category of word.

Mtskheta, one of the country’s most visited towns and covered in this site’s Tbilisi day-trip guides, opens with four consonants in a row and no vowel until the second syllable; the trick most visitors land on is a quick, almost swallowed “m’ts-khe-ta” rather than trying to hit each consonant with full weight. Tskaltubo and Mtskheta share the same opening cluster; Kvareli and Kutaisi, by contrast, are straightforward once you know Georgian vowels are pure (no diphthongs sliding between sounds the way English vowels do).

A reasonably reliable trick: say the name slowly, syllable by syllable, rather than at conversational speed, and most Georgians will understand you even with an accent that would be unrecognisable spoken fast. Drivers and hosts are used to visitors mangling place names and will usually repeat it back correctly without making a point of the correction, which is the fastest way to actually learn the right pronunciation over a few days.

Loanwords, false friends and Soviet-era vocabulary

A layer of Georgian vocabulary, particularly around technology, bureaucracy and transport, is borrowed directly from Russian, a legacy of seven decades in the Soviet Union that outlasted the political relationship. Marshrutka itself is a Russian loanword (from marshrut, “route”), as is avtobusi (bus) and taksi (taxi) — recognisable to anyone with a little Russian or even just French or German, since the underlying roots are shared across European languages. This matters practically because it means transport vocabulary is often the easiest category to guess at, even with zero Georgian, since the loanwords sound close enough to their European equivalents to recognise on a sign or hear in conversation.

Georgian itself also lent a few words the other way, though rarely into English directly — khachapuri and khinkali are increasingly recognised internationally as Georgian food culture spreads, appearing on menus in London, Berlin and New York without translation, a small but real marker of how far Georgian cuisine’s reputation has travelled in the last decade.

Learning a little before you land

For anyone who wants a head start beyond this list, a short language app course (several of the major ones now include Georgian) covering the alphabet and twenty or so core phrases over a couple of weeks before departure makes a genuine difference to how the trip feels, distinct from trying to absorb everything from a printed phrasebook on the flight over. The alphabet specifically rewards advance practice, since recognising letter shapes on a moving marchroutka sign or a restaurant specials board is a skill that needs a bit of repetition to become fast enough to be useful in the moment, rather than a slow letter-by-letter decode that the bus has already left before you finish.

Georgian polyphonic singing, a UNESCO-recognised tradition, is also worth a mention here for anyone keen to go beyond vocabulary: hearing it live, at a folk performance or in the informal setting of a supra where a table breaks into song between toasts, connects the sound of the language to something memorable in a way flashcards don’t, and several of the nightlife and folk show venues around Tbilisi programme it regularly for visitors specifically interested in the tradition.

Where the effort pays off most visibly

If there is one place a visitor notices the payoff from even a small amount of Georgian, it is the old town rather than a museum or a monastery. Wandering the courtyards and balconied streets covered in A self-guided walking route through Tbilisi’s Old Town, you’ll pass small family-run bakeries, wine cellars and workshops where nobody is expecting English and a greeting in Georgian visibly changes the interaction — a nod, a smile, sometimes an offer of a taste of something not on any menu. None of this requires fluency; it requires trying, audibly, in the local language rather than defaulting straight to English or gesturing.

The same applies at Tbilisi’s markets and smaller neighbourhood shops, where a “gamarjoba” and “madloba” bookending a transaction, however simple, reads as basic courtesy rather than a language lesson, and tends to soften prices and attitudes in exactly the situations — haggling gently over a souvenir, asking a favour of a stallholder — where a purely transactional approach gets you further only some of the time.

A realistic minimum to actually learn

If you only commit ten words to memory before a Georgia trip, this is the shortlist that earns its keep: gamarjoba (hello), madloba (thank you), ki (yes), ara (no), ukatsravad (excuse me), khinkali and khachapuri (so you can order without pointing), gaumarjos (the toast), sad aris (where is), and angarishi (the bill). None of it is difficult to memorise on a flight, and using even one or two of them consistently changes how interactions feel — less like a transaction, more like an attempt at courtesy that Georgians, by broad and consistent report, notice and appreciate.

Frequently asked questions about Georgian language basics

Is Georgian a hard language to learn?

For English speakers, yes — it isn’t Indo-European, has its own alphabet, and its grammar includes consonant clusters that take real practice. Nobody expects a tourist to speak it properly; a few phrases, attempted with effort, are received warmly regardless of accuracy.

What alphabet does Georgian use?

Mkhedruli, a unique 33-letter alphabet unrelated to Cyrillic, Latin or Greek. It looks intimidating on signage but is fully phonetic once you learn the letter shapes, unlike English spelling.

Is Russian widely spoken in Georgia?

Among people over roughly 40, generally yes, a legacy of Soviet-era education. Younger Georgians mostly learn English instead, and given the political history with Russia, leading with English is both more useful and more comfortable for everyone.

How do you say thank you in Georgian?

Madloba (მადლობა) for everyday use, said constantly and appreciated however it’s pronounced. Gmadlobt is the more formal version for an older host or a business setting.

Do Georgians use nodding and shaking for yes and no the same way as in the West?

Broadly yes, though older Georgians sometimes use a single upward head tilt or a tongue click for no, a habit shared with parts of the Caucasus and Balkans that can briefly confuse first-time visitors.

What is the Georgian word for cheers, for the supra toasts?

Gaumarjos (გაუმარჯოს). At a formal supra, toasts are led by the tamada and the table drinks together on his cue, so following his lead matters more than the exact word.

Can I get by with English menus and signs in Tbilisi?

In the old town, Vake and Saburtalo, mostly yes. Move into residential neighbourhoods or rural Georgia and English signage thins out fast, which is where a phrase or two, or a translation app’s camera function, becomes genuinely useful.