How to Say Hi in French Without Sounding Wrong

The casual way to say hi in French is salut, pronounced /sah-LÜ/ - the final T is completely silent.

But salut comes with a rule English « hi » doesn’t have: it’s for people you know. Say it to a shopkeeper or your new boss and it lands as over-familiar. This page gives you the informal greetings French people actually use - salut, coucou, and the texting shorthand - plus the exact line where you must switch to bonjour.

Greetings are your first LexiFr deck - every word with native audio. Get it on the App Store or Google Play.

Salut: the French « hi »

Two things make salut sound right:

• The T is silent: /sah-LÜ/, never /sah-loot/. (Final consonants are usually silent in French - rule one of our French pronunciation guide.)
• The U is the French /ü/: say /ee/, keep your tongue there, round your lips.

Use salut with friends, family, classmates, colleagues you’re on friendly terms with, and children - at any time of day. The natural follow-up glues right on: Salut, ça va ? /sah-LÜ sah VAH/ - « Hi, how’s it going? »

Bonus feature: like the Italian ciao, salut works in both directions. It’s « hi » when you arrive and « bye » when you leave - same word, same pronunciation.

Coucou and the other informal greetings

Salut isn’t alone. Here’s the informal shelf, from everyday to affectionate:

Coucou deserves a note: it’s the sound of the cuckoo clock and of peek-a-boo, and as a greeting it’s warm, slightly childlike, and enormously common - especially in texts between couples and close friends. It is never professional; treat it as the greeting equivalent of a hug.

You’ll also hear ça va ? used entirely on its own as the greeting - the answer can be as short as ça va ! (fine!), which conveniently is the same words back.

When « hi » is wrong: the bonjour rule

Here is the line. With strangers, shop staff, waiters, officials, older people, and anyone in a professional context, the greeting is bonjour /bohn-ZHOOR/ - or bonsoir /bohn-SWAHR/ in the evening. Not salut.

This matters more in France than the English equivalent. Walking into a bakery and launching your request without bonjour is genuinely rude - the greeting is a small social contract that says « I see you as a person before I see you as a service ». Say bonjour first, then ask for the croissant.

The salut/bonjour line tracks another line you’ll meet everywhere in French: informal tu versus formal vous. Roughly, salut goes with tu-people and bonjour covers vous-people. Our guides to using tu vs vous correctly and formal vs informal French map that territory in full - and for the complete greeting inventory beyond « hi », see every way to say hello in French.

Texting: how French people write hi

French texting compresses greetings hard. You’ll want to recognize these even if you never type them:

In couples’ and close friends’ chats, cc and coucou dominate - a morning text often opens with nothing more than « Coucou ça va ? ».

The re-bonjour trap

A quirk that surprises learners: you don’t say bonjour twice to the same person in the same day. Greeting a colleague with a second bonjour at 3 pm quietly implies you forgot the first one. What French people do instead:

• Re ! /ruh/ - informal shorthand, literally « re- », meaning « hello again ».
• Re-bonjour ! - slightly jokey, fine among colleagues.
• A smile, a nod, or going straight to the topic.

Salut escapes this rule entirely - it’s reusable all day, one more reason it’s the default among friends.

Quick decision guide

• Friend, family, peer → salut (or coucou if you’re close)
• Stranger, shop, restaurant, work → bonjour
• Formal setting after ~6 pm → bonsoir
• Texting a friend → slt / cc

Greetings are the highest-frequency words you’ll ever learn - you’ll use one within ten seconds of every French conversation for the rest of your life. Get salut and bonjour into your ear with native audio, apply the one rule, and you’ll never open a conversation wrong.