Tea, Té and Chai Are One Chinese Word That Took Two Roads

Ask for a cup of tea in London and you say tea. In Madrid you ask for a té. In Moscow you ask for chai. They sound like two quite different words, and in a sense they are. But they are two ways of saying one Chinese word, and the difference between them is mostly a matter of how the tea itself reached each country.

In China, tea is written with a single character, 茶, and that character is pronounced differently in different parts of the country. In Mandarin and in Cantonese it is cha. But along the south-east coast, in Fujian, people speaking the Min languages, such as Hokkien, say te. The same drink, the same written word, two sounds.

From there the word left China by two roads. The older one was overland. Tea travelled west through Central Asia along the trade routes often called the Silk Road, and the word cha went with it. In Persian it picked up an ending and became chay. From there it spread to many languages across that part of the world, and Russian, whose tea for centuries arrived over land, took it as chai.

The other road was the sea. In the 1600s the Dutch became the great tea merchants of Europe, and their trading ports in Asia were in Fujian and Taiwan, exactly where people said te. The Dutch called it thee, and as they carried shiploads of it home and sold it on, the word travelled with the cargo. English made it tea, French thé, German Tee, and Spanish té.

There is one famous exception at sea, and it proves the rule. The Portuguese arrived in China earlier, in the 1500s, and traded through Macau, where people spoke Cantonese and said cha. So Portuguese, unlike its seafaring neighbours, calls tea chá.

English, as it tends to, ended up keeping more than one. Tea came from the Dutch. Char, as in a cup of char, is an old slang word that came from cha. And chai arrived much later, in the twentieth century, through Hindi and Urdu, and in English it usually means tea brewed with milk and spices. Spanish speakers ordering a chai latte are doing the same thing.

We can trace all this because the sounds give the routes away. Words for new goods tend to arrive with the goods, carried by the people who sell them, and a language borrows whatever the traders in front of it happen to say. Linguists who map the words for tea around the world find the pattern again and again: languages that got their tea by sea mostly say something like te, and languages that got it over land mostly say something like cha. Every cup, in its name, still remembers how it came.