Punjabi Words for Feelings and Emotions ਜਜ਼ਬਾਤ

What to know before you use these

• Feelings arrive rather than being had — "Mainu gussa aaya" is literally "anger came to me". Punjabi often puts the emotion in the subject position and you in the receiving one.
• "Rabb da shukar hai" fills a gap — It does the work English gives to "thankfully" or "thank goodness", and it is used constantly, by the religious and the not-especially-religious alike.
• This is where gendered verbs first bite — "Main pyaar karda haan" from a man, "kardi haan" from a woman. Say the whole sentence with the ending that matches you.

Other situations

Smaller topics — meeting someone new, the weather, shopping, work, family — live in the full phrasebook, alongside every phrase on this page. See the phrasebook index for the whole set, or the dialogues for these phrases inside whole conversations.