January in Other Languages

How to say January in different languages

The table lists January in 50 languages, in alphabetical order. Pronunciations are simple English-style respellings with the stressed syllable in capitals; they are approximations, and regional accents vary. For languages written in other scripts, a romanization follows in parentheses.

January in Arabic: two naming systems

Arabic has two common names for January. يناير (yanāyir), a form of the Latin name, is used in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states, and Morocco. كانون الثاني (kānūn ath-thānī), "the second Kanun," is used in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine and Iraq.

The second name belongs to a set of month names inherited from the old Syriac calendar, in which December is كانون الأول (kānūn al-awwal), "the first Kanun." In Algeria and Tunisia, جانفي (jānfī), borrowed from French janvier, is common. Pan-Arab media often print two names together, such as يناير/كانون الثاني.

Neither name belongs to the Islamic (Hijri) calendar. Its months are lunar, so they move through the solar year and have no fixed match with January.

Languages that use the Latin name

Most languages in Europe, and many beyond it, use a form of Latin Ianuarius, the month named after Janus; see January facts for the history of the name. The Romance languages show the family resemblance most clearly: Spanish enero, Portuguese janeiro, French janvier, Italian gennaio, Catalan gener and Romanian ianuarie.

Germanic languages and many Slavic, Baltic and Uralic languages use closer copies of the same name: German Januar, Swedish januari, Russian январь, Latvian janvāris, Hungarian január. Celtic languages adapted it too, giving Irish Eanáir and Welsh Ionawr.

Other languages received the name through a European language. Persian ژانویه comes from French janvier, Tagalog Enero from Spanish, and Hindi जनवरी, Bengali জানুয়ারি and Urdu جنوری from English.

Languages with native names for January

Some languages kept their own words for the month, several of them describing winter:

• Finnish tammikuu: literally "oak month," from tammi (oak) and kuu (moon, month).
• Czech leden: from led, "ice."
• Croatian siječanj and Ukrainian січень: from an old Slavic root meaning "to cut," usually explained as the season for felling trees.
• Lithuanian sausis: linked to sausas, "dry."
• Turkish ocak: "hearth" or "stove," a fitting word for midwinter. Turkish previously used kânunusani, from the same Syriac-derived system as Arabic كانون الثاني.
• Polish styczeń, Basque urtarrila and Scottish Gaelic am Faoilleach are also native words rather than forms of Ianuarius.

Old Slavic month names can mislead across borders. Slovenian prosinec, a traditional name for January, means December in Czech, and Croatian prosinac is December too. Folk names also survive alongside the Latin-derived ones, such as Romanian gerar, from ger, "frost."

Is January capitalized in other languages?

English capitalizes month names, but many languages do not. January is written in lowercase, except at the start of a sentence, in Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Catalan, Romanian, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic, Finnish, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Slovenian, Croatian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Russian, Ukrainian, Hungarian and Esperanto.

German capitalizes Januar because every German noun takes a capital letter. Greek, Irish, Welsh, Indonesian, Malay and Afrikaans also capitalize the month. Turkish writes ocak in lowercase on its own but capitalizes it in a specific date, such as 1 Ocak.

Several languages also change the word's ending in dates. Russian uses января (1 января, "the 1st of January"), Polish stycznia, Ukrainian січня and Greek Ιανουαρίου.

Numbered and zodiac month names

Chinese, Japanese and Korean name the months with numbers. January is 一月 in Chinese (yīyuè) and Japanese (ichigatsu), literally "one month," and 일월 or 1월 (irwol) in Korean, where 일 means "one" and 월 means "month." Vietnamese tháng một ("month one") and Swahili mwezi wa kwanza ("first month") follow the same pattern, and in each system February is month two.

These numbered names refer to the Gregorian month. The first month of the traditional lunisolar calendar has its own name: 正月 (zhēngyuè) in Chinese and tháng Giêng in Vietnamese, the month that opens with Lunar New Year between January 21 and February 20. In Japan, 正月 (shōgatsu) means the New Year holiday period that begins on New Year's Day, January 1, and the traditional name for the first month is 睦月 (mutsuki).

Thai month names come from the zodiac. มกราคม combines มกร (makara), the sign Capricorn, with an ending meaning "arrival." Thai months with 31 days end in -คม (-khom), while those with 30 days end in -ยน (-yon).

Related

• January facts
• Lunar New Year
• Zodiac signs
• New Year's Day
• Printable calendars
• January 2027 calendar