International Thank You Day

What the day is

International Thank You Day is observed on January 11. No origin for it is documented.

Origin and background

The most surprising research here concerns how seldom thanking actually happens. Linguists recorded everyday interactions across eight languages on five continents, looking at the moments when one person asks another for something small and gets it. Gratitude was expressed in only a tiny fraction of those exchanges, in the region of one in twenty.

The interpretation is not that people are ungrateful. It is that small-scale cooperation is treated as the default among people who know each other. Handing over the salt does not need acknowledging, because nobody involved thought there was any chance it would be refused. Thanks marks the exceptional, and constant thanking would imply the help was in doubt.

That explains a cross-cultural friction English speakers run into. In several languages, thanking a close family member for an ordinary act lands as cold rather than polite, because it treats an intimate as a separate party doing you a favor. Speakers of some South Asian languages describe exactly this: the words exist, and using them at home creates distance. Travelers who read this as rudeness have the analysis backwards.

English, by comparison, thanks constantly and at strangers, which is one of the things that marks it out.

None of this argues against the day. It sharpens it. If routine thanks is mostly social lubricant, then the thanks worth spending effort on are the ones for things nobody was obliged to do, said to people who rarely hear it.

How to take part

• Thank somebody for something that was genuinely optional on their part.
• Say what they did rather than just the word, which is what makes it land.
• Notice how often you thank strangers compared with family, and consider whether that is the right way round.
• Learn the word in another language, and how often speakers actually use it.
• Thank someone up the chain who never hears from the people they helped.