English inherited its calendar vocabulary wholesale from Latin, so it is easy to assume everyone else did too. They did not. Month names in other languages fall into three broad groups — those that borrowed the Roman set, those that kept native seasonal names, and those that use plain numbers — and the differences matter as soon as you are reading a foreign document or storing a date in software.
This note maps the main families, gives the actual names in French, Spanish, German and Japanese, and explains what the variation means for date handling. If you only need the numeric position of a month, the month number page gives it without any language attached.
Which Languages Use the Latin Month Names?
Most of Europe and much of the world it colonised. The Romance languages inherited the names directly, the Germanic languages borrowed them, and modern Greek, Turkish in part, and hundreds of administrative systems worldwide adopted them alongside the Gregorian calendar.
What travelled was the Roman set: Janus in January, the purification rites of februa in February, Mars in March, then Maia and Juno, then Julius Caesar and Augustus in the two renamed months, then the four numbered names ending the year. Where those names came from originally is set out in where month names come from.
French, Spanish and German Side by Side
The three most commonly consulted European sets are close enough to guess at and different enough to get wrong. Here are the distinguishing features of each:
- French: janvier, février, mars, avril, mai, juin, juillet, août, septembre, octobre, novembre, décembre. Always lowercase, even at the start of a date.
- Spanish: enero, febrero, marzo, abril, mayo, junio, julio, agosto, septiembre, octubre, noviembre, diciembre. Also lowercase; January is the one name that has drifted furthest from Latin.
- German: Januar, Februar, März, April, Mai, Juni, Juli, August, September, Oktober, November, Dezember. Capitalised, because all German nouns are.
- Regional variants: Austrian German uses Jänner for January, and Spanish sometimes writes setiembre for September, so a single language can carry more than one accepted form.
German speakers also say Juni and Juli as "Juno" and "Julei" on the phone to keep them apart, which is a reminder that ambiguity in month names is a spoken problem as well as a written one. The same instinct explains why aviation and shipping avoid spoken month names altogether and quote dates as numbers.
Italian and Portuguese complete the Romance picture with gennaio and janeiro for January, both plainly descended from Januarius. Once you can see the Latin under the surface, month names in other languages within this family become largely predictable — the exception being January, which has drifted furthest in Spanish, and August, which several languages kept almost unchanged from Augustus.
Languages That Number Their Months
Japanese, Chinese and Vietnamese do not name months at all in ordinary use; they number them. Japanese January is 一月, ichigatsu, literally "one month", running through to 十二月, jūnigatsu, for December.
This is the tidiest system in use anywhere. There is nothing to memorise, no gender or capitalisation to get right, and no month whose name contradicts its position — the problem that leaves September sitting ninth with a name meaning seventh, explained in why September is the ninth month. Japanese does retain a set of older poetic names, such as yayoi for the third month and shiwasu for the twelfth, and shiwasu in particular still appears in seasonal writing and advertising. Chinese follows the same numeric pattern with yīyuè through shí'èryuè, and Vietnamese with tháng một onwards.
Languages That Kept Native Names
Several Slavic languages rejected the Roman set and kept descriptive native month names drawn from weather, farming and plants. Czech has leden for January, from ice, and listopad for November, meaning leaf-fall. Polish, Croatian and Ukrainian have comparable systems.
These are charming and genuinely dangerous, because the same word can occupy different positions in different languages. Listopad is November in Polish and Czech but October in Croatian — a one-month error waiting to happen in any document translated by eye. Finnish takes another route again, building every name on kuu, moon or month: tammikuu, helmikuu, and joulukuu for December, the Yule month. Polish is a hybrid, mixing native names such as styczeń and kwiecień with the Latin-derived maj and marzec.
Turkish is another mixture, drawing some month names from Latin, some from Arabic and Persian, and some from older Anatolian usage. Modern Greek, by contrast, adopted the Roman set almost intact. The pattern across Europe is roughly geographical: the further from the Mediterranean and the later the conversion to the Gregorian calendar, the more likely a language kept its own month names.
Month Names Outside the Gregorian Calendar
Other calendars have their own month names entirely, and these are not translations of anything. The Islamic Hijri calendar runs Muharram, Safar and on through Ramadan to Dhu al-Hijjah. Because it is purely lunar, with twelve months of 29 or 30 days, its year is about eleven days shorter than the Gregorian one and its months move steadily through the seasons.
The Hebrew calendar is lunisolar, with month names such as Nisan, Tishrei and Adar that are largely Babylonian in origin, and it keeps in step with the solar year by inserting a thirteenth month seven times in every nineteen years. Neither set maps onto Gregorian month names, which is why dates converted between them can only be given as ranges when the year is stated loosely.
What Does This Mean for Handling Dates?
Store months as numbers and format them at the last possible moment. Month names in other languages vary in case, spelling, grammatical form and even position, so any system that stores or compares the words themselves will eventually get a date wrong.
Four specific traps account for most real failures:
- Grammatical case: Russian, Czech and Greek use a different form of the month name inside a date than when naming the month alone, so a word-for-word substitution reads as broken.
- Abbreviation length: English three-letter abbreviations do not transfer. Several languages abbreviate to four letters, and some do not abbreviate at all.
- Ambiguous numeric formats: 03/04 is March in one convention and April in another. ISO 8601, written year-month-day with the month as two digits, removes the ambiguity entirely and is why so many systems standardise on it.
- Shared words, different months: as with listopad, a familiar-looking name may not be the month you assume.
None of this affects the underlying calendar. Whatever the language, the Gregorian month lengths are identical, and the figures on the days in month page apply everywhere the Gregorian calendar is used. The current month's number is shown alongside its name on this month, which is the safest thing to quote in a message crossing languages.
Conclusion
Month names in other languages divide neatly into three families: the Latin-derived names carried by French, Spanish, German and most of Europe; the numbered months of Japanese, Chinese and Vietnamese; and the native seasonal names kept by Czech, Croatian, Polish and Finnish. The numbered systems are the least error-prone, the native ones the most likely to trip up a reader, and the Latin ones familiar enough to be misread with confidence. When precision matters, use the number. The month number page maps names to numbers in both directions, and the rest of the calendar references sit on months.now.