Most languages' word for tea comes from one Chinese word, which left China by two roads in two shapes: tea and cha. Here are 31 languages, each with its word and its WALS value.
Schematic, not to scale. On narrow screens only the selected language is labelled; the table lists all. The grey dots are a rough hand-made outline of the land, not borders and not survey data. Each marker sits near where the language is mainly spoken, not at a precise point; many languages cover far more ground.
The Chinese character 茶 is read chá in Mandarin and similarly in Cantonese. In Min Nan (Hokkien), spoken around the port of Xiamen, once called Amoy, on the coast of Fujian, it is usually given as tê. The two roads are usually explained by who heard which: people who got tea by ship from Fujian tended to hear the Min Nan form, and people who got it overland, or from Cantonese-speaking Macau, tended to hear a cha form. Search snippets of Wikipedia's article on the etymology of tea suggest the sea/land story is a simplification (I could not open the article itself).
Same plant, same character, two local pronunciations. That is the whole story in one line; the rest is the detail.
The te family is usually linked to sea trade. The Dutch East India Company (VOC) began shipping tea to Europe in the early 1600s, and its Dutch word thee is the usual explanation for French thé, German Tee, and English tea. Whether the Dutch took the word straight from Min Nan or through Malay traders in Java is disputed. Spanish té, Swedish te, Malay teh and Sinhala tē are all on the list. Sinhala and Tamil are sometimes tied to the Dutch presence in Ceylon; I have not checked that link, and it is not needed to classify them.
Min Nan itself, listed here, is the source of the sea form.
The cha family is usually tied to overland trade across Central Asia: Persian chāy, Russian chay, Turkish çay, Arabic shāy (reported as a later borrowing from Persian), Hindi chāy. Chinese neighbours with long contact, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese, also have cha-type words, and so do Mongolian and Tibetan. Swahili chai is cha-type too, and is generally thought to have arrived across the Indian Ocean from the north, though I did not trace it.
Portuguese traders were based at Macau from the 1550s, among Cantonese speakers. Portuguese chá is cha-type even though it travelled by sea, and English cha (1590s) is reported to have come that way. So the rule is not that sea routes carry te; the rule of thumb is that the word follows the dialect of the port you buy from. English later picked up chai from Hindi too, so English has both.
Polish herbata is usually said to come from Latin herba thea, "tea herb". That makes it arguably a te-type word with a Latin front; I mark it "other" and that is a judgement call. Burmese laphet-yay is built from its own word for tea leaf, and I list it as "other" too, unverified.
Thai ชา (chaa) is cha-type, which may surprise anyone who expects the sea route to give te. I did not trace why, and I list it by what it sounds like, not by what geography predicts.
| Language | Word | Said | Route | WALS 138A |
|---|
cldf/values.csv, fetched 14 October 2026; Dahl, "Tea", in Dryer and Haspelmath (eds), The World Atlas of Language Structures Online, CC BY 4.0, wals.info/feature/138A). The file has 230 languages: 110 cha, 84 te, 36 other, which agrees with the totals on wals.info. The table above shows the result per language; the counts are computed by the page.