How Do You Say “Law” in…? | In Custodia Legis: Law Librarians of Congress

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…?

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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.

6 Comments

Gabriel Balayan
June 10, 2016 at 11:14 am
Thanks for posting this video, what great memories I’ve experienced watching it.

By the way, in Armenian it’s Iravunk [Իրավունք]
justina.gr
June 11, 2016 at 11:24 am
Νόμος in Greek
Antong KWOK
June 12, 2016 at 9:09 am
Hukum in Indonesia
zana
August 11, 2016 at 4:36 pm
Knjižnica on Croatian
Malou Gil
May 2, 2017 at 6:13 am
Philippines (Filipino language) it is ‘Batas’
Marcial R. Batiancila
September 11, 2018 at 12:58 am
“Balaod” in Cebuano (Philippine language)

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