Months of the Year in 272 Languages: Month Names by Language, from Arabic to Zulu

Where the month names come from

Most names for the months of the year in the table descend from Latin. The Roman calendar gave the year Ianuarius, Februarius, Martius, Aprilis, Maius and Iunius, then Iulius and Augustus for Julius Caesar and Augustus, and finally September to December, which are simply the seventh to tenth months of an older year that began in March. French janvier, Italian gennaio, Hungarian január, Indonesian Januari and Swahili Januari all go back to that list, sometimes through English or Portuguese.

A second group of languages kept names of their own, mostly taken from the farming year and the weather. Polish styczeń, luty and marzec, Czech leden, únor and březen, Croatian siječanj and veljača, Ukrainian січень, лютий and березень, Lithuanian sausis and vasaris, Finnish tammikuu and helmikuu, Turkish ocak and şubat, and Basque urtarrila and otsaila owe nothing to Rome. In Finnish every month ends in kuu, the word for both moon and month.

A third group counts. Chinese writes 一月, 二月, 三月, “month one, month two, month three”, and the table gives Japanese with digits, 1月 to 12月, the form used in dates. Korean 1월 to 12월 works the same way, and Vietnamese tháng một to tháng mười hai means “month one” to “month twelve”.

Capital or small letter

English, German and Welsh capitalise the months: January, Januar, Ionawr. French, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish write them in lower case: janvier, gennaio, januari, styczeń, janeiro, enero. Portuguese capitalised them until the 1990 Orthographic Agreement. Catalan appears with capitals in the table, as the source gives it, although standard Catalan spelling also uses lower case.

Two names for one month

A semicolon marks variants. German lists Januar and Jänner, the Austrian form; Belarusian gives both май and травень for May; Hebrew spells March as מרץ, מרס and מארס. Several languages of Russia show a Russian loan beside an older native name, as Evenki январь; гиравӯн for January.

Arabic month names: two calendars of names

Arabic month names for the Gregorian calendar come in two sets, and the table carries both. The first borrows the European names: يناير yanāyir, فبراير fibrāyir, مارس māris, then مايو, يونيو and يوليو for May to July and سبتمبر to ديسمبر for September to December. This is the set used in Egypt and on the Arabian Peninsula.

The second set, in the row Arabic (Levant and Iraq), uses old Semitic names that the region shared with Syriac and Aramaic: كانون الثاني kānūn aṯ-ṯānī for January, شباط šubāṭ, آذار āḏār, نيسان nīsān, حزيران ḥazīrān, تموز tammūz, آب āb and أيلول aylūl, then تشرين الأول and تشرين الثاني for October and November and كانون الأول for December. The Syriac row shows the same names in their original script, from ܟܢܘܢ ܐܚܪܝ to ܟܢܘܢ ܩܕܡ. Nīsān, āb and aylūl are also months of the Hebrew calendar.

Both sets of Arabic month names belong to the solar year. The months of the Islamic lunar calendar, from Muḥarram to Ḏū l-Ḥiǧǧa, are a third set with a different length of year; they stand with other calendars on the page on months in other calendars.

Reading the months of the year by language

Each row gives the months of the year as they are written in that language, not a transliteration. Where the script is not Latin, many cells carry a romanisation beneath the word: Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac, Amharic and the Indian scripts among them. Right-to-left scripts keep their direction inside the cell, so a copied name pastes in the right order.

Some languages appear twice. Maori has a row with the loanwords Hānuere, Pepuere and Maehe and another with the traditional names Kohi-tātea, Hui-tanguru and Poutū-te-rangi. Xhosa is listed with the forms used in school and the media, uJanuwari, uFebhruwari and uMatshi, and again with the traditional names EyoMqungu, EyoMdumba and EyoKwindla, which describe the season: the month of the tambookie grass, of swelling grain, of the first fruits.

The columns always run from January to December. A language whose year traditionally starts elsewhere, as the Xhosa year once started in winter, is still aligned with the Gregorian months so that a column can be read straight down.