Tea is historically recorded as being originally sourced from and shipped to the rest of the world from China. There were two major points of exit for Chinese tea in the mid-1600s, and local dialects provided the origins of the two main spellings and pronunciations for the words used to transliterate the Chinese character for tea; however, there are several ways that this character can be pronounced. The history of the words used around the world for tea all trace back to one of two sources: either the eastern China port of Amoy (now known as Xiamen) or the southern China ports of Canton (now known as Guangzhou) and, to a lesser degree, Hong Kong. In the Min-Nan dialect (also referred to as the Amoy dialect) spoken around Xiamen, the character for tea is pronounced and spelled similarly to te. Both the Cantonese dialect spoken by the southern coastal population of China and the Mandarin dialect of the northern Chinese pronounce this character as cha or ch’a. With the Dutch and the Portuguese (and later the English) being the early links to the West as far as the tea trade is concerned, one would expect that the use of one or the other of these pronunciations would follow the historical trade routes that became established by these merchant explorers. This may have been true during the late seventeenth century, but it does not follow true after the mid-eighteenth century, for reasons that are not completely clear to linguists.
The two main pronunciations branches follow, with representative examples of their worldwide variations (various accent uses not noted):
Te: Catalan, Danish, Hebrew, Italian, Latvian, Malay, Norwegian, Spanish, Swedish
Tea: English, Hungarian
Tee: Afrikaans, Finnish, German, Korean
The: French, Icelandic, Indonesian, Tamil
Thee: Dutch
Cha: Greek, Hindi, Japanese, Persian, Portuguese
Chai: Russian
Chay (caj): Albanian, Arabic, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Serbian, Turkish
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