indikativ

Indikativ, or indicative mood, is a grammatical mood used to express statements of fact, beliefs, or questions about reality. It is the default mood for verbs in many languages and is used for declarative sentences that report events as they occur or occurred. It contrasts with the subjunctive, which marks non-factual or hypothetical situations, and with the imperative, which conveys commands in languages that maintain a three-way mood distinction.

In languages that differentiate moods, the indicative typically hosts the standard tense system for stating facts. English uses the indicative for present, past, and future tenses, including forms such as I eat, I ate, I will eat, as well as aspects like I am eating and I have eaten. Other languages vary in how they encode tenses in the indicative; some rely on a range of forms such as present, imperfect, perfect, pluperfect, and future, often with auxiliary verbs or inflectional endings.

Across language families—Romance, Germanic, Slavic—the exact shapes of the indicative and its tenses differ, but the mood generally serves to assert real events, reported speech, or routine statements. In many languages, the indicative is the default mood used in everyday narrative and description, with subjunctive and other moods invoked for doubt, wishes, or commands.