friendly ways of saying HOW ARE YOU?

In English, there are some friendly and casual ways of asking “how are you?”  Some of the most common are the following:

• How are ya?
• How ya doin’?
• How’s it goin’?

People sometimes sometimes say “how are you?” (/haw ar yu:?/) in more business-like or formal situations, like a hotel clerk greeting a guest.

In a more casual way, though, and in order to sound friendlier, one would use a reduced vowel, called schwa (/ə/), for the words “ar” (/ər/) and “you” (/yə/).  Friends might, for example, more typically greet each other with this pronunciation.  You could also use this pronunciation anytime you want to sound friendlier.

All of these questions are typically just used as greetings for people we don’t know very well, and we don’t usually expect a long answer.  “Fine”, “good”, “not bad” … are therefore typical answers.

“How ya doin’?” is a shortened form of “How are you doing?”, which we very rarely say.  The helping verb “are” is almost always dropped.  “You” is pronounced as /yə/ and the final consonant in “doing” is almost never pronounced as /ŋ/ (e.g. – king, thing, sing).  Rather the /ŋ/ is “shortened” to /n/.  It is very common to pronounce “ing” progressive suffixes as /in/ rather than as /iŋ/.

“How’s it goin’?” is a shortened form of “how is it going?”.  To pronounce this greeting in the normal way, you need to shorten “is to “‘s” and link it to “it”.  As with “doing”, “going” is pronounced as /go:.in/ with an /n/ sound, not with an /ŋ/ sound.

To hear the pronunciation of these greetings/questions, please watch the video below: