Wishes and Irrealis: ek wens, was dit maar

A wish is a statement about something that is not the case — you wish you were rich precisely because you are not. This is the domain of the irrealis: language that describes unreal, counterfactual, or merely desired states. Afrikaans, having shed the rich subjunctive its Germanic cousins still carry, expresses the irrealis with a few lean tools: the verb wens ("to wish"), the past-tense modal sou, a plain past form standing in for an unreal present, and — most characteristically — the little particle maar, which turns a flat statement into a heartfelt wish. This page shows how those pieces combine, including the beautiful inverted Was ek maar daar construction that competitors routinely omit.

ek wens + a clause

The workhorse is ek wens ("I wish") followed by a clause. The conjunction dat is optional and usually dropped in speech. The crucial point is the verb form inside the wish: because you are wishing for something unreal, the clause typically uses a past form or the modal sou / kon — never a plain present, even when the wish is about the present moment.

Look at Ek wens ek was ryk: the wish is about now ("I'm not rich now and I wish I were"), yet the verb is was (past), not is. This past-for-present shift is the Afrikaans counterpart to English "I wish I were" — using a past form to flag unreality. With kon ("could") and sou ("would"), the unreality is carried by the modal itself.

Wishing about the past: ek wens + het

To wish about something that already happened differently — a regret — use ek wens with the perfect (het ... ge-). This is the "I wish I had..." of English.

Note that English insists on a precise tense layering here — "wish" + past perfect ("had listened"). Afrikaans is more relaxed: the ordinary perfect het geluister does the job, and you do not need to build an extra layer of pastness. Trying to mirror the English past perfect exactly tends to produce overwrought, unnatural Afrikaans.

sou: the "would" of unreal results

sou is the past tense of sal ("will"), and it is the standard way to mark the result side of an unreal situation — what would happen if things were otherwise. It pairs naturally with a conditional, but it also appears in softened wishes and hypotheticals.

The combination sou graag wou ("would dearly want to") is a fixed, very natural way to express a wishful "I'd love to". Stacking the modals like this — sou + wou — is idiomatic and stronger than either alone. The full machinery of if-clauses with sou lives on conditional sentences.

maar: the particle that makes it a wish

Here is the element English speakers miss entirely. The particle maar — distinct from the conjunction maar meaning "but" — drops into a clause to intensify it into a longing, an "if only". It adds the emotional weight of just / only in "if only I could". Without it, the sentence is a flat statement; with it, it aches.

Compare As ek geweet het ("If I had known", a neutral conditional opener) with As ek *maar geweet het ("If only I had known", a wish-tinged lament). The *maar is what converts a hypothesis into heartfelt regret. There is no single English word that does this — we resort to the whole phrase "if only" — which is exactly why learners leave maar out and end up sounding cooler and more clinical than they mean to.

The inverted wish: Was ek maar daar

Now the elegant one. Afrikaans can form a counterfactual wish without any conjunction at all, by inverting the verb to the front — exactly as it does in a yes/no question — and dropping in maar. The pattern is [finite verb] + subject + maar + .... It is more literary and emphatic than ek wens, and it is one of the most graceful constructions in the language.

Structurally, Was ek maar daar fronts was (the verb), follows it with the subject ek, inserts maar, and lands the rest — no as, no wens. It looks like the start of a question (Was ek daar? = "Was I there?"), but the maar and the falling, wistful intonation mark it unmistakably as a wish. This zero-conjunction irrealis exists in English only in fossilised, very formal phrasing ("Were I there...", "Had I known..."), which is why it feels so literary; in Afrikaans it is a living, if elevated, construction.

This is closely related to the conjunction-less conditionals on conditionals without as: the same fronting that builds an if-clause without as also builds a wish without wens.

A note on what Afrikaans does NOT have

For a B2 learner coming from German or the Romance languages, it is worth stating plainly: Afrikaans has no living subjunctive mood. There is no special verb form for wishes the way Spanish has quisiera or German has wäre / hätte. The few survivors — set phrases like lank lewe die koning ("long live the king") — are frozen idioms, not a productive system, and are covered on subjunctive remnants. Everything on this page is built from ordinary past tenses, ordinary modals, and the particle maar. That is the entire irrealis toolkit, and it is much smaller than the one you may be bracing for.

Common mistakes

Key takeaways

• Afrikaans has no productive subjunctive; wishes are built from past tenses, the modals sou / kon, and the particle maar.
• ek wens
  • a clause expresses a wish; use a past form (was) or sou/kon for present wishes, and the perfect (het ... ge-) for regrets about the past.
• The particle maar (here "if only / just", not "but") is what turns a hypothesis into a heartfelt wish: As ek *maar...*.
• The inverted Was ek maar daar / Het ek maar geweet formula expresses a counterfactual wish without any conjunction — literary, graceful, and worth recognising.
• Do not force the English "wish + past perfect"; Afrikaans uses the plain perfect.