Tense in North American Icelandic

Abstract

All languages have the capability of expressing events happening at different times. When this time distinction is built into the grammar, we talk about tense. The usual distinction in tense is between past, present and future. In Icelandic, the past and the present are represented inflectionally but in order to give a future reading an auxiliary verb is required. It is thus the custom to talk about Icelandic having only two tenses. The same goes for North American Icelandic.