Explore six untranslatable words from around the world that reveal how different cultures understand love, connection, and human intimacy.
“Something may have been lost in translation, but it certainly wasn’t love,” Erich Segal writes in his novel The Class.
Love, Language, and Human Connection
Love at first sight, when you are a child, seems like a feasible experience. Caught eyes, the sudden realisation that this person will be the subject of your heart’s desires. When we grow up, we learn that knowing someone is more intimate, because in knowing someone, you learn they are not perfect, but that you love them still.
Contrary to popular belief, the majority of our communication is through our physical language, the way our pupils dilate, and how we relax around someone we love and trust. Our words and language are used to speak such feelings, to specify and articulate the warmth in our chest, the preoccupation in our mind. Sometimes, such feelings, in their intricacies, are specific to certain languages and cultures. Meaning, on occasion, you may not be able to say exactly how you feel in a language that is not your own.
In English, we have one word for love: love. Of course, there exist similar words like affection, passion, or devotion, but none of these has the same exact meaning. They are facets, reflections of love, rather than words that embody the whole. If we traverse the world, we will find hundreds of other words that describe their own interpretation of love, all resisting simple translation.
Jeong and Collectivist Love
The Korean word jeong means love in a certain sense. Again, there is no one definition, even amongst Koreans. It is a type of love extending beyond just people, an attachment to objects or places, or even homes. Western societies tend to be built upon ideas of individualism, and jeong is born out of collectivist ideas of social responsibility.
Although there is no one sole understanding of jeong, most agree that it is something to be experienced, rather than described. It can be simple actions between strangers, the owner of the bakery giving you an extra pastry, keeping the door held open for an elderly woman, or offering a stranger a kind conversation.
Koi no Yokan and Romantic Premonition
Koi no yokan is a Japanese phrase that encapsulates the feeling of that heart-stopping first encounter. The type of encounter that serves as a premonition of the love to come. People will have many loves over their lifetime, but it is rare to experience this kind of premonition, this burning feeling that tells you this may be something more than just attraction.
Koi no yokan is a soft, slow-burning feeling. Something that grows and blooms, needing water and sunlight, differs from the Western idea of ‘love at first sight’.
Mamihlapinatapai and Shared Longing
The Yaghan are an Indigenous community living at the tip of South America, a place some people call ‘the edge of the world’. The last fluent speaker of Yaghan passed away in 2022, but the language is not yet extinct. Many consider the language simply lying dormant, waiting to be revitalised.
The Yaghan word mamihlapinatapai describes, most generally, a look of longing shared between people. A silent, shared wish that both want to initiate something deeper, but neither wants to be the person to instigate it. Words like these hold their own worlds and philosophies, and argue that language and their cultures must be protected.
Philautia and the Importance of Self-Love
The ancient Greeks had a word for the love that we reserve for ourselves, called philautia. A kind of self-love that allows us to protect our own well-being and not sacrifice it for the pleasure of others. Philautia does not have narcissistic tendencies; it is not to navel-gaze or concentrate only on our own problems, but rather, it is to practice self-compassion and set healthy boundaries.
The ancient Greeks knew that self-fulfilment is vital to happiness, but that we cannot use this as an excuse to abuse others to achieve our own goals. The nuance of language means words like philautia guard their beauty and subtlety through resisting translation.
Ya’aburnee, Mortality, and Devotion
Ya’aburnee is an Arabic word that does something the Western world is afraid of – it references the eventual passing of life. In English translation, ya’aburnee means ‘you bury me’, but its meaning is far deeper. Often used amongst familial relationships and romantic relationships, it describes loving someone so much that you cannot possibly imagine living without them.
So, in saying ya’aburnee, you are professing that you hope it is you who passes first, because to bury them would be to live in a world without them. Call it morbid, but it expresses a feeling many of us have burning within us but can never speak out loud.
Kilig and the Thrill of Romance
Have you ever experienced the rush of adrenaline following a romantic encounter, a first date filled with butterflies, or a catching of eyes on separate ends of a room? The Filipinos describe such a feeling as kilig. You can feel kilig in many alternate moments; it is a shudder of delight that runs through you after a moment of romance. The Tagalog word fills a gap in the English language and has consequently been added to the Oxford dictionary.
When we cannot translate, we add, we develop, and we transform. Although the words to describe love are different in each respective culture, the fact that it exists at all is constant across the world, across all of history. These six words may not have a direct translation, but they define feelings that exist within us without definition. As our world grows more interconnected, our understandings of love will too, and there is a certain kilig in that.
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Vincent Phan
Vincent is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of 1000 Libraries Magazine. He is a Paris-born ex-corporate turned bookseller and philosopher, on a global mission to spread the joy of physical books in our age of digital technology.
