It is the smallest word in French, and one of the most important. Choose your greeting well and you sound like someone who belongs. Choose it badly and, however good your grammar, something feels slightly off. Here is how to get it right.
Bonjour is your default, and in France it is close to compulsory. You say it when you walk into a shop, approach a desk, get into a taxi, or begin almost any exchange with almost anyone. Skipping it and launching straight into a question is the single most common way English speakers come across as brusque, even when they are being perfectly friendly in their own heads.
Think of bonjour less as “hello” and more as “I acknowledge you as a person before I ask you for something.” That is the cultural job it does. From late afternoon onwards, it gives way to bonsoir, good evening, which works the same way.
If you remember nothing else: say bonjour first, every time, to everyone. It is the politeness that unlocks the rest.
Salut is the relaxed greeting you use with friends, family, classmates and colleagues you know well. It is warm and informal, and unlike bonjour it works both coming and going: you can say salut to arrive and salut to leave.
The catch is register. Salut to a shopkeeper you have never met, or to your partner's grandmother on first meeting, lands as a little too familiar. When in doubt with someone new or senior, stay with bonjour.
Coucou is softer and more playful still, the equivalent of “hiya” or popping your head round the door. It belongs with close friends, family and children, and it lives especially happily at the top of a text message. Used with the right person it is charming. Used with your bank advisor, it is a surprise nobody asked for.
Here is a lovely subtlety. You generally say bonjour to a given person only once a day. Greet the same colleague with a fresh bonjour an hour later and you may get a gently amused “on s'est déjà vu ce matin!” (we already saw each other this morning). The graceful fix is rebonjour, or simply re among friends, which acknowledges the second meeting with a wink.
Picture three concentric circles. The outer circle, strangers and anyone in a formal or service setting, is bonjour territory, all day, no exceptions. The middle circle, people you know and like as equals, is where salut lives. The inner circle, the people you are fond of, is where coucou feels at home.
Get those circles right and you will already sound more French than a year of vocabulary lists can make you. It is a small thing, and that is exactly why it matters: native speakers notice the small things, because the small things are where real fluency hides.
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