ladytharen:

operaticspacetrash:

Does anyone know how to do dates in the Star Wars calendar outside of years? Are there names for standard months? I’ve only managed to find some info on the days of the week so far.

@writebetterstarwars any answers?

I don’t normally answer questions on other people’s posts, so I hope you don’t mind @operaticspacetrash, but this one is relatively straightforward. Within the Galactic Standard Calendar there are no names for months, and they are known by their number (e.g., Month 5). You probably know that there were many different variants of the calendar, all with different numbers of months in a year, weeks in a month, and days in a week. The GSC consists of 24 hours in a day, 5 days in a week, 7 weeks in a month, and 10 months in a year. These 10 months, plus 3 festival weeks and 3 holidays make up a year with a total of 368 days. In the Old Republic, the Treaty of Coruscant was used as year 0; in the New Republic, it was the Battle of Yavin.

I’m guessing that what you’re wondering about is how to write this out and refer to specific dates, like how we would say [day]/[month]/[year]? This is covered by the Great ReSynchronization. It was a notation system established in 35 BBY which used the format [year]:[month]:[day] to write dates. 35 BBY was the reference point, so, for example, the Jedi Purge occurred in the year 16 and the Battle of Yavin in the year 35. Years before 35 BBY are written with “BrS” (before resynchronization) after the number, so Qui-Gon would have been born in 57 BrS. Adding in the months and days, you get something like the date 13:5:21 (13 years after 35 BBY, on the 21st day of Month 5), on which occurred the First Battle of Geonosis. Much like how we might say “June of 2015” you can omit the day and just write [year]:[month].

This system was used through the Imperial period (though some preferred to use the Empire’s creation as year 0) and was reorganized in 25 ABY into the BBY/ABY system that we often use. Before the Great ReSynchronization and after it was disbanded, there is no canonical system for writing dates. It is possible that the [year]:[month]:[day] format was still used, but this is not confirmable.

You may also want to take a look through my tag on calendars.

Hope that helps!

~ Jacen