Goodbye in Georgian you may say using different phrases. Depending whom you are talking to and sometimes also at what time. There is also one universal phrase you can say goodbye in Georgian, no matter to whom and when and we have included it, as well in our Georgian lesson.
Today’s article is one of several in the Georgian self-study materials about first small talks in Georgian. You can use this series as a Georgian language mini course for beginners 😉 We have already described how to say good morning in Georgian. We have covered as well the main question “How are you” in Georgian. So the time has come to learn the goodbye in Georgian.
How to say goodbye in Georgian (always)?
Let’s start our mini lesson of Georgian with the phrase you can use almost in any situation. This is the most neutral one and you can use it when addressing someone familiar or a more formal way. This is the Georgian word
ნახვამდის
Literally it means by till seeing (you), because ნახვა means in Georgia to see and the ending -ამდე means till some point in time or space. In many other languages there is a similar phrase, maybe you know one of those.
How to say goodbye in Georgian informally?
In Georgian language there is a possibility to say goodbye differently as well. That is why when you study Georgian with us, we have to tell you this. The phrase you may have already heard during you trips to Georgia and used in those informal situations is
კარგად
Literally it means „well”. Saying კარგად as a goodbye in Georgian is a short form from the phrase კარგად იყავი, what we can translate as “be well”. The second word იყავი is the imperative form of the verb to be, about which you can learn in this Georgian lesson. Thus by saying this you wish someone to be well.
Maybe you know it already from your study of Georgian language, that the verbs change their forms (conjugate) depending on which person takes action. So the above mentioned form is the 2nd person singular, so you (შენ) and we use it when know someone and talk with them in a familiar way.
How to say Georgian good bye in a formal way?
Here we get the help from above mentioned phrase, but we need to change the form of a verb into 2nd plural (თქვენ). Just a reminder, in Georgian we create the formal forms (Sir/Madam) by using them in 2nd person plural. If you do not know yet the Georgian pronouns, check out this article in a form of Georgian lesson.
Hence to sum up this all formally we would say goodbye in Georgian using this phrase
კარგად იყავით
As you may see, it’s quite similar to the previous form. The only difference is the last letter which indicated you are talking to someone in Georgian in a formal way (or to a bigger group of people).
How to say good night in Georgian?
As we are learning today saying goodbye in Georgian, let’s see as well the evening version of it, so good night. Maybe you know already from our Georgian lesson about saying hello during different times of the day that such a phrase consists of two parts. The first one is the name of the time of the day we talk about and the second comes from the word “peace”. So good night in Georgian is
ღამე მშვიდობისა
Of course similarly to English we may say goodbye in the evening and it will not be a big mistake. However, often if it is already evening or the night, we use the abovementioned phrase.
What is left for you is to repeat and revise the new material from today’s Georgian mini lesson in your own dialogues or in real-life conversations. If you want to get update about the next articles and lessons we post on our blog about Georgian, join also our newsletter “Caucasian mail.”