Tea or Chai

Tea - the most popular beverage on the planet! Tea spread throughout the world, thanks to the efforts of Chinese merchants. When the British, who were hooked on tea, could no longer source it from China due to tensions, they turned to their crown jewel: India. While tea was not well known in India, some tribes in Assam grew and consumed a variant of it. The British however, turned India into a tea production powerhouse, mainly for exporting back to England. Following independence, India began to produce more tea for domestic consumption, leading to a boom in its popularity in the nation.

The spread of tea has some very interesting linguistic footprints. I recently came across a blog by Stanford professor, Dan Jurafsky. Professor Jurafsky has done a lot of research in the areas of food and the linguistics of food, has published a book, The Language of Food, and also teaches a course called The Language of Food at Stanford. Dr. Jurafsky noted that the primary words for tea originate from two base words. “Cha” originates from Mandarin and Cantonese and “Te” originates from Southern Min, a dialect spoken in Fujian and Guangdong provinces and Taiwan. In the blog, he shows how the languages around the world inherited versions of these words based on which part of China they traded with. Countries that traded tea through overland trade routes like the Silk Road used the Chinese pronunciation “Cha,” and countries that received tea by the sea used “Te.”

Professor Jurafsky’s ideas made me wonder - how does India play into this? Both words, “Tea” and “Chai” are used in different parts of India, and with India’s proximity to China and connection to tea culture, I wonder if the same trend would apply in India or not. I would expect the whole country to use “Tea” as it was promoted by the British and was not particularly popular before. Professor Jurafsky briefly touches on a part of this puzzle where he postulates that the word “Chai” in Hindi and Urdu must have come from the Mughals via the land route. This makes perfect sense, but how about the rest of the country? More on this in my next blog post!