Days of the week in Chinese: xīngqīyī to xīngqīrì, pinyin and tones

Why the Chinese days of the week are numbers

Modern Chinese names its weekdays by counting. The word for week comes first and a number follows it, so Monday is literally week-one and Saturday week-six. English Wikipedia's article on weekday names describes the system and its one exception: Sunday takes rì, day or sun, in place of a seventh number, and in speech often tiān, day or sky.

English Wikipedia renders the word xīngqī as stellar period. Chinese Wikipedia's article on the week records that the seven-day cycle reached China from the west, carried by Manichaean and Buddhist contacts during the Tang dynasty, when each day was named after one of the seven luminaries: the sun, the moon and five planets. Those planetary names survive in Japanese and Korean. In 1905 the scholar Yuan Jiagu proposed xīngqī to replace the old term for the seven luminaries, and in 1907 the Qing government fixed xīngqī as the official name over lǐbài.

Learners who can count to six can therefore name every working day at once. The trap lies in the tones: all three syllables of xīngqīyī are said in the high, level first tone, and the yī of Monday changes its tone before other syllables in running speech, which Wiktionary marks in its IPA. The other numbers keep their own tones: èr falling, sān high, sì falling, wǔ low, liù falling.

Xīngqī, zhōu and lǐbài: the Chinese words for week

Xīngqī is the standard word, used in speech and writing everywhere. Zhōu, cycle, is shorter and appears in writing, on timetables and in news: zhōuyī for Monday, zhōumò for the weekend. Unicode CLDR, the locale data behind phones and computers, uses it for the short day names in both simplified and traditional Chinese, which write the character differently, as the table above shows.

Lǐbài, worship, is the colloquial word. Chinese Wikipedia explains that the days were first called lǐbài after the Christian day of worship, before xīngqī replaced it officially, and that lǐbài remains common in Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan and parts of the south-east coast of China. English Wikipedia adds that it dominates in some regional varieties of Chinese. Lǐbàitiān is a perfectly normal way to say Sunday in conversation.

Sunday has the most forms. Xīngqīrì is standard and the only one used in the written abbreviation; xīngqītiān is the everyday spoken form. Wiktionary marks zhōutiān as regional, and English Wikipedia notes that it is rarely used compared with xīngqītiān.

How to use the days of the week in Chinese

To ask which day it is, Chinese replaces the number with jǐ, how many: xīngqī jǐ? Wiktionary lists xīngqījǐ as the question which day of the week. The answer slots the number back in: jīntiān xīngqīsān, today is Wednesday. The verb shì, to be, is optional in this kind of sentence.

Time words go before the verb, not at the end of the sentence as in English. On Monday is simply xīngqīyī placed before the action, with no preposition. The day of the week also follows a full date, often in brackets: English Wikipedia's article on date notation in China describes the order year, month, day, then the weekday, which is often put in brackets. CLDR's full date format for simplified Chinese runs the same way, with the characters for year, month and day after each number and xīngqī'èr at the end for a Tuesday.

Chinese has no capital letters, so there is no capitalisation question. In pinyin the days are written as one word in lower case, with an apostrophe where a syllable starting with a vowel would otherwise run into the previous one: xīngqī'èr.

Does the Chinese week start on Monday or Sunday?

In mainland China the week starts on Monday. CLDR records Monday as the first day for simplified Chinese, and the numbering itself puts Monday at one. The weekend is Saturday and Sunday: English Wikipedia's article on the working week says China introduced the two-day Saturday and Sunday weekend on 1 May 1995. Around public holidays the government moves weekend days to create longer breaks, so a Saturday can become a working day.

Traditional Chinese counts differently in software. CLDR sets Sunday as the first day of the week for traditional Chinese and for Hong Kong, so date pickers there show Sunday in the first column, although the day names themselves are the same. The days of the week table lists Chinese beside Japanese and Korean, whose names still follow the planets.