Irrealis mood
set of grammatical moods indicating that a situation or action is not known to have happened at the moment the speaker is talking
In linguistics, irrealis moods (abbreviated irr) are the main set of grammatical moods that indicate that a certain situation or action is not known to have happened at the moment the speaker is talking. This contrasts with the realis moods. They are used in statements without truth value (imperative, interrogative, subordinate, etc).
Every language has grammatical ways of expressing unreality. Linguists tend to reserve the term "irrealis" for particular morphological markers or clause types. Many languages with irrealis mood make further subdivisions between kinds of irrealis moods. This is especially so among Algonquian languages such as Blackfoot.
List of irrealis moods
Moods
Subjunctive
The subjunctive mood, sometimes called conjunctive mood, has several uses in dependent clauses. Examples include discussing hypothetical or unlikely events, expressing opinions or emotions, or making polite requests (the exact scope is language-specific). A subjunctive mood exists in English, but it often is not obligatory.
“Irrealis mood” enters the record as set of grammatical moods indicating that a situation or action is not known to have happened at the moment the speaker is talking. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Irrealis, mood and grammatical can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q362703. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Irrealis mood” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.