Tenseless language


In linguistics, a tenseless language is a language that does not have a grammatical category of tense. Tenseless languages can and do refer to time, but they do so using lexical items such as adverbs or verbs, or by using combinations of aspect, and mood, and words that establish time reference. Examples of tenseless languages are Burmese, Dyirbal, most varieties of Chinese, Malay, Thai, Vietnamese and in some analyses Greenlandic and Guaraní.