How to Say Hello in Russian: Formal, Informal & Casual Greetings

There are two greetings worth learning first, and the gap between them matters more than any other pair of words in Russian. Привет (privet) is the informal hello you use with friends. Здравствуйте (zdravstvuyte) is the polite hello you use with everyone else.

Get that choice right and you sound like someone who has spoken to a Russian before. Get it wrong and you are either oddly stiff with a friend or too familiar with a stranger. Everything below is about making the choice automatic, and you can practise on real first names when you generate a Russian name to greet.

The greetings that cover almost every situation

Seven entries is enough. Longer lists exist, and most of what they add is either regional, dated or slang that will sound strange coming from a learner.

Choosing between them: the ты and вы test

Russian has two words for “you”. ты is singular and informal. вы is plural, and it is also the polite singular you use with one person you do not know well.

That grammar decides your greeting. If you would call the person ты, say Привет. If you would call them вы, say Здравствуйте.

You will not always know which applies, and there is a simple fallback: use Здравствуйте. Being slightly too polite passes without comment. Being too casual gets noticed.

A few reliable cases:

• Friends, siblings, cousins, classmates, children. Привет.
• A shop assistant, a waiter, a receptionist, a taxi driver. Здравствуйте.
• Someone clearly older than you, whatever the setting. Здравствуйте.
• A colleague you have worked with for years and joke with. Usually Привет, but follow their lead.
• Anyone you have just been introduced to. Здравствуйте until they switch first.

The switch from вы to ты is a small social event in Russian. The older or more senior person offers it. You do not take it yourself.

Pronouncing Здравствуйте without panic

This word has a reputation, and part of it is undeserved. It looks like eleven letters of consonant, but one of them is not pronounced at all.

The stress falls on the first syllable: здра́вствуйте. Everything after it is unstressed and gets shorter and flatter, which is why the ending sounds more like tye than a crisp te.

Now the part most guides skip. In the cluster вств, the first в is silent in standard pronunciation. You are saying ZDRAST-vooy-tye, not zdrav-stvooy-tye. The same drop happens in чувствовать (chuvstvovat, to feel), which is pronounced choo-stvuh-vat. Wiktionary’s entry for здравствуйте gives the same reduced form in its pronunciation notes.

Break it into three pieces and say them slowly:

ZDRAST  ·  vooy  ·  tye

Then run them together. The opening zdr is the only genuinely unfamiliar part for an English speaker, and English does have it hiding inside phrases like “buzzed rain” said quickly.

Привет is far easier: pree-VYET, stress on the second syllable. The е after в softens that consonant, which is what produces the vy sound rather than a plain v.

The time-of-day greetings

Доброе утро, Добрый день and Добрый вечер are all polite and all safe with strangers. They are a useful escape hatch while Здравствуйте is still difficult to say.

They are also genuinely common. Walking into a bakery at eleven in the morning and saying Добрый день is completely ordinary.

The catch is the clock. These are tied to the actual time, and using the wrong one is a small but noticeable slip. Rough boundaries:

• Доброе утро until about noon
• Добрый день from noon until roughly 5 or 6pm
• Добрый вечер after that

One trap: Доброй ночи (dobroy nochi, good night) is not a greeting. It is what you say when leaving or going to bed, closer to a farewell. The Russian farewells guide covers where it sits.

The one between them: Здравствуй

Здравствуй sits in a gap English does not have. It is the singular of Здравствуйте, so it carries none of the plural politeness, but it is still fuller and warmer than Привет.

You would use it with one person you are on ты terms with when Привет feels too light: an adult greeting a child they know, a teacher greeting a pupil, or two people who are close but where the moment calls for a little weight.

It is much less common than the other two, and a learner never needs it to be understood. Recognising it matters more than producing it, because you will meet it in books and films long before you need to say it.

Answering the phone

Russian keeps its phone greeting separate from everything else. Алло (allo) is the standard answer, stressed on the second syllable, and it exists only for this purpose.

Слушаю (slushayu), literally “I am listening”, is the other common answer and sounds slightly more businesslike. Да (da), just “yes”, is common too and is blunt rather than rude.

Once the call connects, normal greetings resume. A caller who knows you might follow Алло immediately with Привет, это Маша, “hi, it’s Masha”.

Greeting someone by name

Adding a name after the greeting is normal and warm, and it is where the two registers become obvious.

With a friend, the first name alone is right: Привет, Маша!

With someone you address as вы, Russians typically use the first name plus the patronymic, the middle name built from the father’s given name: Здравствуйте, Анна Сергеевна.

That combination is the standard respectful address in Russian offices, schools and clinics. If you are naming a character or practising the pattern, the Russian Name Generator will build the full first name plus patronymic form for you.

Three short dialogues

Reading a phrase in isolation is not the same as hearing where it lands in a conversation. These are short on purpose.

Two friends meeting on the street

Nina. Привет, Дмитрий! Dmitri. Привет! Как дела? Nina. Хорошо, спасибо.

Walking into a pharmacy

You. Здравствуйте. Pharmacist. Здравствуйте, слушаю вас. You. Добрый день. Мне нужен аспирин.

Being introduced to a colleague’s mother

You. Здравствуйте, Ольга Ивановна. Очень приятно. Olga. Здравствуйте. Приятно познакомиться.

Очень приятно (ochen priyatno) and Приятно познакомиться (priyatno poznakomitsya) both mean roughly “pleased to meet you”. The first is shorter and more common in speech.

Notice that the shop assistant answers a greeting with the same greeting. Russian does not have a separate “hello back” phrase. You return what you were given.

Mistakes worth avoiding

Saying Привет to someone behind a counter. This is the single most common error. Service staff, however young, get Здравствуйте.

Greeting the same person twice in one day. Russians generally do not repeat a full greeting to someone already greeted that day. A nod, or the short Ещё раз здравствуйте (eshchyo raz zdravstvuyte, hello again) if you want to say something, covers it.

Using Алло face to face. It only works on the phone. Saying it to someone standing in front of you sounds like a joke about a bad connection.

Stressing Привет on the first syllable. PREE-vyet marks you out immediately. The stress is on the second syllable, always.

Reaching for Здорово. Здорово (zdorovo) does exist as a very casual greeting between young men, but it is slangy and register-sensitive. It is easy to use it in the wrong company, and nothing is lost by staying with Привет.

Is Привет ever written differently?

In messages you will meet Приветик (privetik), a softened, affectionate form built with the same diminutive machinery Russian applies to names. It is friendly and slightly playful, and it is more common among women and in messages to close friends. It would look strange in a work chat.

The pattern behind it is the same one that turns Александр into Саша. Russian is comfortable adding warmth by changing a word’s ending rather than adding another word.

Common questions

Which greeting fits the person in front of you

The list is short. Привет for people you are close to, Здравствуйте for everyone else, and a time-of-day greeting when you want something polite and easy to pronounce.

Once the greeting is out of the way, the conversation usually turns straight to how are you in Russian, which comes with its own set of expectations about how much you are actually meant to say.

Say the greeting to a person, not to a phrasebook, and the choice stops being a decision.