Peace in Different Languages

Peace is one of the words humanity seems to need in every tongue. This guide gives you peace in different languages, from paz to shalom to 和平, with pronunciation for the scripts that differ from English, and then goes further than a simple list: it explains what peace means and where its most famous symbols, the dove, the olive branch and the peace sign, actually come from. For hello and good morning in every language, see our companion guides; here the focus is peace itself.

The table covers widely spoken and widely searched languages, with a simple pronunciation guide wherever the writing system differs from English.

One striking pattern: across much of the Slavic world the word is almost identical. Russian, Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian, Slovenian, Macedonian and Ukrainian all use mir, which doubles as the word for "world".

In Western Europe the Romance languages cluster together, paz in Spanish and Portuguese, paix in French, pace in Italian, while Germanic languages give Frieden in German and vrede in Dutch, and Scandinavia shares fred.

Across Asia, Mandarin Chinese writes 和平 (hépíng), Hindi शां (shanti) and Bengali শা ন্তি (shanti). In the Middle East, Arabic salaam and Hebrew shalom come from the same Semitic root. In Africa, Swahili offers amani, Igbo udo and Zulu ukuthula. Different sounds, one shared aspiration.

Peace carries more than one sense. At the largest scale it is the absence of war and conflict between nations. Within a society it means peaceful coexistence: freedom from tension, respect between groups, and the security to speak and think freely. At the smallest scale it is personal, the inner calm and balance people work towards in their own lives. The same short word stretches from world politics to a quiet mind.

The symbols of peace
Three symbols dominate. The olive branch has stood for peace since ancient Greece and Rome, where it was linked to Eirene, the Greek goddess of peace, and Pax, her Roman counterpart.

The dove, especially carrying an olive branch, draws on the biblical story of Noah, in which a dove returns to the ark with a branch to show the flood is receding; it became a widespread peace emblem in the twentieth century. The peace sign most people picture today was designed by Gerald Holtom in 1958 for the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, combining the semaphore signals for the letters N and D inside a circle, and it spread worldwide through the anti-war movements of the 1960s.

International Day of Peace
The United Nations established the International Day of Peace in 1981. Since 2002 it has been marked each year on 21 September, a day devoted to strengthening the ideals of peace and to non-violence and ceasefire around the world.

To say peace in different languages, a few travel far: paz (Spanish), paix (French), Frieden (German), salaam (Arabic), shalom (Hebrew) and 和平 (Chinese). Much of the Slavic world shares mir. Beyond the word, peace spans everything from harmony between nations to personal inner calm, and its best-known symbols, the olive branch, the dove and the 1958 peace sign, each carry their own history. Learn a handful of these words for your travels, and pick up whole languages on a course with SPRACHCAFFE.