Here’s a question I’ve been trying to find the answer to. How do the characters in Star Wars catalogue dates? Like they wouldn’t have used BBY like we do, so I’m trying to figure out how they would say it.
I’m guessing you mean during the Republic or at least before Yavin? That’s a really interesting question, I looked around Wookieepedia and this is what I found:
“The last great conflict between the Jedi Order and the Sith resulted in a definitive Republic victory. Resetting its capital on Coruscant, history reset its chrono on this date from which the modern Galactic Republic was born. The time before this rebirth was forgotten as a dark age, lumped into a collective whole known as the "Old Republic." As a result of this change, official calendars reset their zero year onto this date.”
The Galactic Republic started approximately one thousand years before the Battle of Yavin. The major event used as year 0 is the Seventh Battle of Ruusan, resulting in the Ruusan Reformation, event that restructured the entire Galactic Republic:
“It also resulted in the Republic Measures & Standards Bureau resetting the year zero to the year of the Seventh Battle of Ruusan, which would come to be known as 1000 BBY by the Galactic Standard Calendar.”
And yes, there is a Bureau to keep track of all measurement systems!
“The Republic Measures & Standards Bureau (RM&S) was the branch of the Galactic Republic government responsible for maintaining common units of measurement, including time (and presumably weighting, money, and other similar quantities). It was responsible for the Great ReSynchronization setting of time, and presumably for the calendar setting "Year 0" at the Ruusan Reformation.”
Of course if there is a Bureau for all measurement systems, it means that you had more than one in the galaxy, and that’s why you can also found the Lothal Calendar for example:
“On the planet of Lothal, in the Outer Rim Territories. It used the LY ("Lothal Year") notation. Although the exact origins of that calendar had been forgotten by the time of the Galactic Empire, its starting point was dated to 3245 years before Sheev Palpatine's rise to Supreme Chancellor of the Galactic Republic.”
Or the CRC:
“The C.R.C. dating system, also called Hosnian Reckoning, was one of several calendar systems used in the galaxy. Within a given millennium, it was acceptable to indicate a year with only the last three digits preceded by an apostrophe or only the last two digits within a century (e.g. '945 instead of 7945).”
Basically nothing is really set in stone, and the Bureau was always fighting about which system to use. And I’m not even getting into the months/weeks/days/etc... problem, because this was even worse:
“In 23 BBY, the Republic Measures & Standards Bureau debated whether to keep this calendar as one of the twenty or so official calendars of the Republic, with Keelen Ma commenting that the various researchers were getting tired of needing calendar converters on their pads.”
