na?

What it means

1. 1.

   A complete greeting on its own, asked with a rising tone: roughly 'hey — how are you?' The expected answer is 'na' back, and the exchange is over. Foreigners consistently mistake it for the start of a question.

2. 2.

   In combination it steers the sentence: 'na ja' is a hedged 'well…', 'na und?' is 'so what?', 'na klar' is 'of course', 'na also' is 'there you go, told you'.

Examples with translations

• Na? Alles gut?

  Hey — you all right?

• Na ja, so schlimm war's auch wieder nicht.

  Well… it wasn't that bad, honestly.

• Na und? Ist doch egal.

  So what? It doesn't matter.

Where it comes from

An old Germanic interjection of address with no lexical content, recorded in German since the Middle Ages and cognate with similar particles across the continent. Its greeting use is strongest in the north and east and is near-universal among speakers under fifty.