No future tense

Although there are several ways to construct a future meaning in English, there is no stand-alone future tense. We share this apparent oddity with many other languages ~ German, Swedish, Fijian, Afrikaans, Persian, to name but a few. English verbs take four forms. For example: speak(s), speaking, spoke, spoken. There is no further adjustment we can make to the root verb, speak. These forms give us the present and past, but not a future tense.

Here are the most common ways to talk about the future in English:-

Naturally, the context of the sentence should indicate which time period is appropriate and additional information such as ‘tomorrow’, ‘next year’ or ‘on Wednesday at 2pm’ is extremely helpful. There are many other languages with no tenses at all ~ Indonesian, Malaysian, Mandarin Chinese and many native American languages, for instance. These rely entirely on the context, so English is not unusual at all in this respect.

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