Most languages have a past tense, with some having several types in order to indicate how far back the action took place.
Thus a language may have several types of past tense form, their use depending on what aspectual or other additional information is to be encoded.
In some languages, certain past tenses can carry an implication that the result of the action in question no longer holds.
For example, in the Bantu language Chichewa, use of the remote past tense ánáamwalíra "he died" would be surprising since it would imply that the person was no longer dead.
Similarly certain imperfective past tenses (such as the English "used to") can carry an implication that the action referred to no longer takes place.
In southern Germany, Austria and Switzerland, the preterite is mostly used solely in writing, for example in stories.
In speech and informal writing, the Perfekt is used (e.g., Ich habe dies und das gesagt.
However, in the oral mode of North Germany, there is still a very important difference between the preterite and the perfect, and both tenses are consequently very common.
In both West and East Slavic, verbs in the past tense are conjugated for gender (masculine, feminine, neuter) and number (singular, plural).
French has numerous forms of the past tense including but not limited to: Spanish and Portuguese have several forms of the past tense, which include but are not limited to: A difference in the pluperfect occurs between Spanish and Portuguese; in the latter, a synthetic pluperfect exists which follows the imperfect conjugations, but -ra replaces the -va seen in the verb endings.
Many non-Bantu Niger–Congo languages of West Africa do not mark past tense at all but instead have a form of perfect derived from a word meaning "to finish".
In parts of islands in Southeast Asia, even less distinction is made, for instance in Indonesian and some other Austronesian languages.
A number of Native American languages like Northern Paiute stand in contrast to European notions of tense because they always use relative tense, which means time relative to a reference point that may not coincide with the time an utterance is made.
[5] In Belizean Creole, past tense marking is optional and is rarely used if a semantic temporal marker such as yestudeh "yesterday" is present.
Hawaiian Creole English[6] optionally marks the past tense with the invariant pre-verbal marker wen or bin (especially older speakers) or haed (especially on the island Kauai).
(Ai wen si om "I saw him"; Ai bin klin ap mai ples for da halade "I cleaned up my place for the holiday"; De haed plei BYU laes wik "They played BYU last week").