How to Make Friends in a New Country (as an Expat or Immigrant)

Part of our complete guide: Loneliness and Belonging.

Published 9 September 2026

Moving to another country can look like a fresh start from the outside and feel like a quiet ache from the inside. Maybe you crossed an ocean for a job, for study, for someone you love, for safety, or simply for the chance of a better life. Then the boxes get unpacked, the first excitement fades, and a particular kind of loneliness settles in: you are surrounded by people, and yet no one here knows your history, your jokes, or the version of you your oldest friends grew up with. If that is where you are right now, nothing is wrong with you. This is one of the most common feelings in the world, and it does ease. Here is how to help it ease sooner.

Making friends after moving abroad is not quite the same as making friends after a move across town. You are not only rebuilding a social life. You may be doing it in a second or third language, inside a culture whose unwritten rules you are still learning, and a long way from the family and old friends who used to carry you without you noticing. That is a great deal to hold at once. If you have also read our guide on starting over in a new city, much of it still applies. This piece is about the extra weight that distance, culture and language add on top.

Why moving abroad is its own kind of lonely

It helps to name what you are actually carrying, because it is more than “I need to meet people.” When you move to a new country you often lose several things at the same time. Family and old friends are suddenly in another time zone, awake when you sleep. The small comforts that told you who you were, the food, the sounds, the seasons, the humour, are harder to find or gone. Ordinary tasks that you used to do without thinking, a phone call to an office, a joke with a stranger, reading a form, now take real effort. And underneath it all is a strange feeling of being a beginner again at a life you had already figured out.

None of that is failure. It is closer to grief: a normal response to losing a whole invisible world at once. Give yourself the same patience you would give a friend who had lost that much. You are rebuilding from a lower starting point than someone who only moved down the road, and that is simply the honest truth of it.

Give it more time than you think you should

Belonging in a new country tends to arrive slowly, then more or less all at once. The first months are usually the hardest, because so much energy goes into the basics of settling in that little is left over for the very thing you need most, which is meeting people. Try not to measure your progress in weeks. A year is a fairer horizon for a new country to start feeling like home, and many people find the ground shifts under them quietly somewhere in that first year. Keep going a little longer than the lonely voice tells you to.

1. Rebuild small routines so the place starts to know you

Belonging often begins with familiarity long before it becomes friendship. Pick a regular café, a market stall, a walking route, a shop, a park bench, and return to them at the same times. Being a familiar face somewhere, even before you know a single name, quietly tells you that you live here now. In a new country these small anchors do double duty: they teach you the rhythms of the place, and they give you low-stakes, repeated contact with the same people, which is exactly how first conversations eventually start.

2. Find your own community here, and let it be a base, not a hiding place

One of the kindest things you can do early on is to find people who share your background: others from your home country, region, or language. A diaspora community, a cultural association, a shop or restaurant that serves the food of home, a group that celebrates the festivals you grew up with. These people understand the specific ache of being far away without you having to explain it, and they can save you months of confusion with practical help about how things work here.

Let that community be a base you return to, not a room you never leave. It is completely healthy to lean on people who understand you while you find your feet. The only trap is staying so fully inside it that you never test the wider country. Aim for both, at your own pace.

3. Reach for local friendships too

Friendships with people from the country you have moved to are worth the extra effort they sometimes take. Locals can show you the place from the inside, and a friendship across cultures often teaches both people something they could not have learned alone. It can feel harder at first, because everyone here already has their circles, but the ordinary advice on how to make real friends as an adult still holds: friendship is built by seeing the same people again and again around something shared. You do not need perfect fluency or perfect manners. Warmth and showing up repeatedly matter far more than getting every custom right.

4. Let language be a bridge, not a wall

If you are living in a new language, the fear of saying the wrong thing can keep you quiet, and staying quiet is what keeps you lonely. Try to treat every clumsy sentence as a small deposit rather than a mistake. Most people are patient and even touched when they see someone making the effort in their language, and the effort itself is a kind of respect that opens doors.

Language exchanges are one of the most natural friendship engines there is. You help someone practise your language, they help you with theirs, and in an hour of purposeful conversation you have both done a real thing together, which is far easier than manufacturing small talk from nothing. Look for language cafes, tandem meetups, or conversation groups at libraries and community centres. And if the barrier ever feels heavy, remember that plenty of deep friendships run on half-shared vocabulary, a lot of gesture, and goodwill. You have more to offer than your grammar.

5. Choose shared activities that repeat

When you are new and unsure of the language, activities are a gift, because the activity carries the conversation for you. You do not have to be witty over a shared task; you just have to keep turning up. Put yourself into things that happen on a schedule, so the same faces come back:

• A weekly class: cooking, pottery, dance, a martial art, an art group
• An amateur sports team, a run club, a climbing wall, a hiking group
• A choir, an orchestra, or any group built around making something together
• A regular volunteering shift on a set day

Repetition is the magic ingredient. Anything you will do every week will do more for you than a dozen one-off events, because familiarity grows quietly each time you return, and one day the greeting turns into a real conversation.

6. Seek out community spaces open to everyone

Every town has places whose whole purpose is that people can simply be together: libraries, community centres, parks, sports clubs, hobby groups, and volunteer projects. Sociologists sometimes call these the third places that sit between home and work, and they are especially valuable when you are new, because you can show up without an invitation and without belonging to anything yet. Volunteering deserves a special mention: it gives you an instant role and a set of people working shoulder to shoulder toward the same small good thing, which is one of the gentlest ways to make friends when you are starting from zero. Whatever your beliefs or none, look for spaces that welcome everyone rather than ones that ask you to be someone you are not.

7. Say yes early, and be the one who follows up

In a new country, be generous with your yes. The colleague’s dinner, the neighbour’s invitation, the slightly awkward meetup: go, even when tiredness and self-doubt would rather keep you home. Not every outing becomes a friendship, but every yes is a chance, and staying in is a guaranteed nothing. Then do the thing most newcomers forget, which is to follow up. After a decent conversation, suggest the next one: “I am still new here and finding my feet, would you like to get a coffee this week?” It can feel forward. It is almost always welcome. Most people are quietly hoping someone else will make the first move, so let it be you. You will get some non-replies, and that is the ordinary cost of trying, not a verdict on you.

8. If you moved for someone else

If you followed a partner across the world for their job or their studies, you may be carrying a quieter loneliness that is easy to overlook. Your partner often steps into a ready-made world of colleagues and structure, while you build a life from scratch, sometimes without the anchor of work. This is real, and it is not a small thing. Try to treat your own belonging as a project that matters just as much as the move itself, rather than something to sort out “once everything else is settled.” Give yourself a reason to leave the house that is entirely your own: a class, a group, a volunteer role, a language exchange. And say the quiet part out loud to your partner, because someone who cannot see your day can easily miss how heavy it has become.

9. Let homesickness be a passenger, not the driver

Homesickness is love with nowhere to go, and it tends to come in waves rather than a steady line. You can honour it without letting it run the whole show. Keep the ties that comfort you: call home, cook the food you grew up with, mark the days that matter, share your culture with new friends who are usually delighted to be let in. Just watch the trap of living so completely in video calls to your old life that you are never quite present with the people nearby. You are allowed to miss home fiercely and to make a home here at the same time. Both can be true.

Expect a dip, and do not trust it

Somewhere in the first year, many people who move abroad hit a low patch: the novelty is gone, the friendships are not there yet, and a voice starts saying “this was a mistake, I do not belong here.” That voice is loneliness talking, not the truth about your life. It often shows up right before things begin to turn, because you have been planting seeds that have not sprouted yet. Try not to make big, permanent decisions from the bottom of that dip. Keep your small routines, keep saying yes, and give the seeds a little more time.

Why a ready-made community helps so much

Every step here is really one thing wearing different clothes: find a place where the same people gather, on a schedule, around something shared, and keep turning up. That is the whole recipe, and it is exactly what a welcoming community hands you on day one. Instead of assembling belonging from scratch in an unfamiliar language and culture, you walk into a room whose entire purpose is that no one has to be a stranger for long, which is why such communities are a real shortcut for people far from home.

The Tribe is built for exactly this feeling. It is a place to belong when the ground has shifted under you, wherever in the world you have landed. A real person reads every application by hand, and you are welcome whatever your language, background or budget. If you are far from home and tired of being a stranger, that is reason enough to knock.

You will belong here

Right now it may not feel possible, but the loneliness of a new country is a phase, not a life sentence, and almost everyone who has ever moved abroad has felt some version of it. Build your anchors, find your own people and reach for local ones, let the language be a bridge, and give it real time. The country that feels like a stranger today can slowly become the place you cannot imagine leaving. Your people are here. You just have not met them all yet.

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