The Subjunctive Mood in Arabic

In Literary Arabic the verb in its imperfective aspect (almudāri‘) has a subjunctive form called the mansūb form. It is distinct from the indicative in either ending in -a or dropping the final n:

3 singular masculine yaktubu “he writes / is writing / will write” → yaktuba “he may / should write”
3 plural masculine yaktubūna → yaktubū

The subjunctive is used in that-clauses, after Arabic an: urīdu an aktuba “I want to write”. However in conditional and precative sentences,
such as “if he goes” or “let him go”, a different form of the imperfective aspect, the jussive, majzūm, is used. In many spoken Arabic dialects there remains a distinction between the indicative and subjunctive. The difference occurs in the prefix, not in the ending. In Levantine Arabic, the indicative has b- while the subjunctive lacks it:

3 singular masculine huwwe byuktob “he writes / is writing / will write” → yuktob “he may / should write”
3 plural masculine homme byukotbu → yukotbu

Egyptian Arabic has a similar prefix bi-, while Moroccan Arabic uses ka- or ta-.

Copyright © 2005-2010 Subjunctives.com. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled “GNU Free Documentation License”.