The debitive mood is a grammatical mood used in Latvian to express obligation or duty.
[1] In debitive mood all persons are formed by declining the pronoun in the dative case and using the 3rd person present stem prefixed with jā-.
Auxiliary verbs in case of compound tenses do not change, e.g., man jālasa, man bija jālasa, man ir bijis jālasa, man būs jālasa, man būs bijis jālasa – "I have to read, I had to read, I have had to read, I will have to read, I should have read" (literally "I will have to had read" where the future expresses rather a wish and replacing the future with subjunctive (man būtu bijis jālasa) would be less unorthodox.)
More complex compound tenses/moods can be formed as well, e.g., quotative debitive: man būšot jālasa – "I will supposedly have to read," and so forth.
To express possession of something as well as necessity Latvian uses similar constructions to those used by Finnic languages, for example: ManI:DATvajagneed:3.PRES.INDietgo:INFMan vajag ietI:DAT need:3.PRES.IND go:INFliterally "to me needs to go" using the modal vajadzēt that can be conjugated only in the 3rd person