Chai Means Tea. So What Is “Chai Tea” Latte?
It’s 🇬🇧tea in English, 🇫🇷thé in French, 🇪🇸té in Spanish, 🇩🇪Tee in German.
It’s 🇰🇷cha in Korean, 🇹🇷çay in Turkish, 🇮🇷chay in Persian, 🇸🇦shay in Arabic.
In every language, the word for tea sounds something either like te or like cha.
From the QZ article Tea if by sea, cha if by land:
With a few minor exceptions, there are really only two ways to say “tea” in the world. One is like the English term — té in Spanish and tee in Afrikaans are two examples. The other is some variation of cha, like chay in Hindi.
Both words originated in China and they come from different varieties of Chinese. Cha-like words spread across land, along the Silk Road, and te-like words spread over water, by Dutch traders, who were the main traders of tea between Asia and Europe.
Thanks to the Dutch, most languages in Europe use te-based words, including English. Likewise, the word for tea is a cha-based word in most languages of Asia and the Middle East.
Te entered the English language in 1600s. But then in 1970s, cha, the second root word for tea, made its way into the English language as well. This time it was through the Hindi word चाय (cāy). But English already had a way to say tea. So, chai in English has instead come to mean a specific kind of tea: Spiced Indian tea, which is known in India as masala chai.
You might recognize the word masala from chicken tikka masala, a dish consisting of chicken in spiced curry sauce. Masala in Hindi is often used related to food or cooking and it means “mixture of many spices”.
So, masala chai is basically Hindi for “spiced tea”.
Chai tea, on the other hand, means “tea tea” and it is a redundant expression.
Where did “Chai Tea” Latte come from?
It seems this expression was non-existent until 1998 when Starbucks introduced Chai Tea Latte. The phrase became widespread in English shortly after that. Other coffee shops started offering products with the same name. Some companies like Nestlé started releasing chai tea latte coffee capsules. Adding the word tea after chai appears to be a marketing decision popularized by Starbucks to clarify that the product is a kind of tea.
After calling their drink “Chai Tea Latte” for almost two decades, Starbucks finally realized the redundancy of the expression (or maybe they just realized the word chai is recognized as tea by enough people at this point). About a year ago, they’ve updated their drink menu on their website to change Chai Tea Latte to Chai Latte.
The original name of the drink is already stuck in everyone’s minds. Most people still call it a chai tea latte and will probably keep calling it that. So, it might be a little too late.
Most other products that were named similarly have also updated their names to get rid of the redundancy. Nestlé, however, is still selling ”chai tea latte” coffee capsules.
Adding a foreign word to your product name can make it sound sophisticated only if you make sure you don’t follow it with the English equivalent right after it. Perhaps a funny detail about all of this is that latte is just Italian for milk. So, chai tea latte (literally “tea tea milk”) is a 3-word phrase with three simple words from three different languages. And two of those words are actually the same!
