Top of page

How Do You Say “Law” in…?

Share this post:

I work in an amazing place. We sometimes refer to it as a mini United Nations because we have staff from around the globe.  Our Global Legal Research Directorate provides a wealth of foreign, international, and comparative reports for Congress.  You can access our foreign law reference collection in the Global Legal Resource Room. There is also a series of posts, Global Legal Collection Highlights, which feature resources in our collection for a specific jurisdiction.

As we are the Law Library of Congress, I thought it would be nice to ask staff to say the word in their native language.

How do you say “Law” in…?

  • Prawo in Polish by Agata and Aga
  • Direito in Portuguese by Eduardo
  • Droit in French by Nicolas
  • قانون (Qanoun) in Arabic by George
  • قانون (Kanoon) in Urdu by Tariq
  • Recht in German by Jenny
  • право in Russian by Peter
  • ሕጊ (hgi) in Tigrinya by Hanibal
  • 法律 (Fa Lü) in Chinese by Laney
  • Derecho in Spanish by Francisco
  • আইন (Ā’ina) in Bengali by Shameema
  • משפט (Mishpat) in Hebrew by Ruth

If your native language is different from any of the ones listed here (and there are a lot of them), please share the word for law and the language below.

Comments (6)

  1. Thanks for posting this video, what great memories I’ve experienced watching it.

    By the way, in Armenian it’s Iravunk [Իրավունք]

  2. Νόμος in Greek

  3. Hukum in Indonesia

  4. Knjižnica on Croatian

  5. Philippines (Filipino language) it is ‘Batas’

  6. “Balaod” in Cebuano (Philippine language)

Add a Comment

This blog is governed by the general rules of respectful civil discourse. You are fully responsible for everything that you post. The content of all comments is released into the public domain unless clearly stated otherwise. The Library of Congress does not control the content posted. Nevertheless, the Library of Congress may monitor any user-generated content as it chooses and reserves the right to remove content for any reason whatever, without consent. Gratuitous links to sites are viewed as spam and may result in removed comments. We further reserve the right, in our sole discretion, to remove a user's privilege to post content on the Library site. Read our Comment and Posting Policy.


Required fields are indicated with an * asterisk.