Welcome to Refugee Phrasebook: Together we are building an open collection of useful words and phrases for refugees who just arrived. The Refugee Phrasebook is a multilingual tool that provides basic useful vocabulary related to the most common immediate needs.

The project is coordinated by the Initiative “Refugee Phrasebook“, a collective of volunteers based in Berlin and all around the world. Local initiatives are welcome to adapt, print and distribute all contents of this page to support refugees in all regions. It currently contains vocabulary in 28 languages. Before we can continue with design and printing, we need your support to complete these translations:

Please close the browser window if you are not currently working on it, and check back later if you have trouble getting access. Thanks!

Refugee Phrasebook is an open data project. While the first collection of phrases was still limited to a closed document with a narrow use case, volunteers quickly migrated the data to an open table in Google Sheets and significantly increased the number of participants with their network. This step also emphasized a commitment to transparency and openness by publishing the data with a Creative Commons license (CC0), freely reuseable for refugee aid projects everywhere. With this website, we coordinate print versions from publicly available data and enable helpers to create their own version.

There already is an online version on wikibooks (preview here) and several printable versions.

At the moment we focus on design and printing the translations. Luckily, there is already plenty of support in most languages. Please contact your local refugee initiative, grab a copy or design your own, print and destribute.