British baby fever has hit! Quick, grab your thermometer, your fuzzy sweaters and woolen socks, and let’s sweat this fever out of our bodies before Kate Middleton gets pregnant with baby #2.
With what seems like the whole world utterly obsessed with the British Royal Family right now, I have a hunch that afternoon tea parties will have a brief flaring of popularity. After all, everything British is fashionable for the next few minutes and what is more British than afternoon tea?
So no matter in what country you find yourself partaking of afternoon tea, here is how to at least pronounce your favorite beverage in their native languages:
- Afrikaans: tee
- Albanian: caj (pronounced chai)
- Arabic: chai or shai
- Armenian: te
- Azerbaijani: caj (pronounced chai)
- Basque: tea
- Belarusian: harbatu
- Bengali/Bangla: cha
- Bulgarian: chai
- Catalan: té
- Chinese (Cantonese): cha
- Chinese (Mandarin): cha (second tone / pronounced with the “a” in a rising tone)
- Croatian: caj (pronounced chai)
- Czech: caj (pronounced cha-i)
- Danish: te
- Dutch: thee
- English: tea
- Esperanto: teo
- Filipino/Tagalog: tsaa
- Finnish: tee
- French: le thé (masculine)
- Galician: té
- Georgian: chai
- German: der Tee (masculine; the “T†is capitalized because all German nouns are capitalized)
- Greek: tsai
- Haitian Creole: té
- Hebrew: teh
- Hindi: chai
- Hungarian: tea (plural: teak)
- Irish: tae
- Italian: te (pronounced teh)
- Icelandic: te
- Indonesian: teh
- Japanese: o-cha (o- is used as a prefix meaning “honorable” and -cha is used to mean “tea” in various tea names, such as matcha, sencha and hojicha)
- Korean: cha
- Latvian: teja (pronounced tay-ya)
- Lithuanian: arbata
- Luxembourgish: Téi (like in German, all nouns are capitalized in Luxembourish)
- Macedonian: chaj (pronounced chai)
- Malay: teh
- Maltese: te
- Norwegian: te
- Persian: chay (pronounced chai in most areas)
- Polish: herbata
- Portuguese: cha (pronounced shah with a Brazilian accent)
- Romanian: ceai
- Russian: chai
- Serbian: caj (pronounced chai)
- Sinhalese (Sri Lanka): thé (The word for teapot is actually a Dutch loanword. It is theepot.)
- Slovak: caj (pronounced chai)
- Slovenian: caj (pronounced chai)
- Somali: shaah
- Spanish: el té (masculine; pronounced tay)
- Swahili: chai (pronounced cha-i)
- Swedish: te
- Taiwanese: de (boba naicha refers to Taiwan’s popular “tapioca pearl teaâ€)
- Tamil (Sri Lanka): tea
- Thai: chah (chah yen refers to Thai iced tea)
- Tibetan: cha or ja
- Turkish: cay (pronounced chai)
- Ukrainian: chaj (pronounced chay)
- Urdu: chai
- (North) Vietnamese: che
- (South) Vietnamese: tra (sometimes pronounced cha or ja)
- Wolof: achai (pronounced uh-chuy)
- Welsh: te
- Yiddish: tey
- Zulu: itiye
So drink up me hearties, yo ho, no matter where in the world Carmen Sandiego is!
Let’s blame that close out on sleep deprivation shall we?