How to say I love you in Arabic

Valentine’s Day in Cairo, Egypt. (Photo credit: schmuela)

February 14 is Valentine’s Day, the day of love and friendship celebrated in many parts of the world.  A quick internet search shows that in Arabic-speaking countries like Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Palestine, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen, Valentine’s Day is celebrated to some degree, although many of the news articles about Valentine’s Day in these countries indicate a deep cultural ambivalence about this “new” Western holiday.  Saudi Arabia, however, is not one of those places: all forms of Valentine’s Day celebrations were banned in that country in 2011 and 2012, and people can get in trouble for even wearing red on February fourteenth. In Iran (whose official language is Persian but where Arabic is also spoken), there is a holiday called Sepandārmazgān that celebrates the earth, mothers, and wives, on February 18th. In Egypt, Valentine’s Day has been celebrated on November 4th since the 1950′s.  In Israel, a holiday celebrating love called Tu B’av is celebrated in the summer.

Regardless of whether it were legal in your country, if you wanted to wish somebody happy lovers’ day in Arabic, you could say E’id u’oshaq sae’id.  And e’id al-hob means day of love or feast of love.

Here is a video from Maha explaining how to say love in Arabic and how to say other love-related words.

Arabic Studio has an article about the semantics of different Arabic words related to love, called The 11 Stages of Love in Arabic.  It takes the reader through all of the Arabic words used to describe the process of falling in love, in order, from attraction, attachment, and infatuation, to affliction, grief, enslavement, and insanity. Does that say something telling about Arabic culture or just the psyche of the person who wrote the article?

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