I bet that caught your attention.

How, you wonder, could the most influential language spoken on the planet today be doomed to oblivion?

What I mean is that English doesn’t actually have a future tense. 

In contrast, English does grammatically encode the past tense with ‘-ed’: if you attach ‘-ed’ to any regular verb, you will create a past tense form, eg, ‘walk’ > ‘walk-ed’, or ‘look’ > ‘look-ed’. On irregular verbs, the past tense is formed by changing the vowel in the verb stem, eg, ‘sing’ > ‘sang’, or ‘break’ > ‘broke’. 

In contrast, English has no specific grammatical marker for expressing the future tense. 

But, you protest, what about ‘will’? Well, ‘will’ is not a true tense marker. Consider a sentence like: ‘Jane will have arrived by now.’ In this case, Jane’s arrival doesn’t occur at some future time – if anything, she has already arrived. 

The ‘will’ in the above sentence does not express the future, but instead suggests that Jane’s arrival is highly likely. 

If the speaker had replaced ‘will’ with ‘might’, or ‘must’, or ‘could’, she would be changing her prediction. 

So in fact ‘will’, ‘might’, ‘must’, and ‘could’ are not future markers, but ‘modals’. 

Modals are used to express speaker attitude, or the likelihood of an event’s occurrence. 

Therefore, modals actually fall under a different grammatical category, distinct from tense: modality is one category; tense is another.

As a grammatical category, ‘tense’ expresses time. 

As we have already seen, English only has one tense marker, which is ‘-ed’, to mark past tense. 

So in fact, English really has only two tenses: 1. the past (marked with ‘-ed’ on verbs); 2. everything else – that is, the ‘non-past’. 

This doesn’t mean that English speakers have no way of expressing the future – of course we do. 

Going back to our modals: while ‘will’ may not be a tense marker in the purest sense of the word, it is quite likely that when we use ‘will’ to convey the high probability of an event’s occurrence, that we are also suggesting that the event is going to happen at some future time. 

It is only when we add in a word like ‘now’ (as we did with the above example) that we bring that event into the present time. 

The combination of ‘will’ and ‘now’ only makes sense, of course, on the assumption that we are not present at the location where Jane is arriving – otherwise we would be in no position to predict her arrival, because we would already know from firsthand observation whether she has arrived or not.

On the other hand, consider a sentence like ‘I leave for London next Friday’. Clearly, my departure is going to happen in the future. But how do we know this? In this case, we don’t have a modal to help us out. 

Instead, ‘next Friday’ does the job. In fact, it’s the random little words and phrases like ‘now’ and ‘next Friday’ that carry a heavy functional load in expressing temporal concepts in English. 

So, English has no dedicated future tense marker, and we instead rely on modals and other ‘time’ words and phrases to convey this information. 

Does this mean that it is somehow grammatically deficient? Not at all. 

In fact, English has plenty of company. Japanese is another language that only distinguishes the past from the non-past. 

Greenlandic and Dyirbal only distinguish the future from the non-future. And Burmese and Mandarin Chinese have no grammatical means at all for encoding tense distinctions – they use other strategies, instead.