Subjunctive Remnants and the Optative

If you come to Afrikaans from a Romance language — Spanish que tengas, French qu'il vienne — or even from the carefully maintained subjunctive of formal English (I insist that he *be present), you will spend a while looking for the Afrikaans equivalent and slowly realise there isn't one. Afrikaans has *no productive subjunctive. The mood that once marked wishes, blessings, and hypotheticals with a special verb form has been almost entirely dismantled. What remains is not a system but a museum: a small set of frozen expressions — wish formulas, a few blessings, two or three set phrases — that preserve the old verb shapes the way a fossil preserves the outline of a leaf. This page teaches you to recognise those fossils. It does not teach you to make new ones, because you cannot. For the genuinely productive way Afrikaans handles "would" and irrealis meaning, see the conditional with sou.

The headline fact: the subjunctive is gone

This is one of the clearest examples of the radical simplification that defines Afrikaans. Dutch, its parent, still has a recognisable subjunctive (the -e form: leve de koning, het ware beter). Afrikaans has shed almost all of it. There is no longer any verb ending that marks a wish or a hypothesis as such. Where another language would switch the verb into a special mood, Afrikaans either uses a perfectly ordinary verb form, or — for genuine irrealis — wheels in the auxiliary sou.

The mag-optative: wishes and blessings

The single most productive-looking survivor is the wish formula built on mag (the modal "may"). Placed at the front of the clause, mag opens an optative — a wish that something good come to pass. This is the direct cousin of English May you be happy, and it is the one fossil that still feels alive enough to slot new content into.

The word order is the giveaway: the clause begins with mag and the subject follows it (mag + jy/dit/jou poging …), the inverted shape Afrikaans uses for questions and wishes. This is the closest Afrikaans comes to a genuinely usable optative, and you will meet it in toasts, cards, sermons, and good wishes of every kind. A fuller collection lives on blessings and wishes.

A particularly fixed sub-type is the funeral blessing, where mag wishes peace on the deceased:

Treat the funeral and blessing phrases as set expressions (formal / liturgical). You can swap the subject (mag jy / mag julle / mag hulle), but you should not try to extend the pattern into ordinary irrealis statements — mag is for wishing, not for hypothesising.

lank lewe — the long-life toast

The toast Lank lewe …! ("Long live …!") is a true fossil. Word for word it is "long live(s) the …", and the verb lewe sits in front of its subject in a way no ordinary Afrikaans statement does — a frozen relic of the old optative word order. You raise it at weddings, birthdays, and ceremonies.

You cannot productively reshape this. Lank lewe is welded together; you may change only the noun that follows. Try to build a parallel "long X the Y" and it collapses — the construction exists only in this one frozen slot.

sy and ware — the deepest fossils

A few survivors preserve genuinely archaic verb forms — endings that have otherwise vanished from the language entirely. These are the deepest fossils, and most speakers use them daily without realising they are handling antique grammar.

The verb wees (to be) has an old subjunctive sy, surviving in:

The same fossil sy is buried inside everyday compounds — hetsy … hetsy (whether … or), danksy (thanks to), samesyn (togetherness) — where speakers no longer feel any "subjunctive" at all.

The Lord's Prayer is the place to watch the subjunctive die in real time. Compare the two languages line for line. Dutch still keeps the true old subjunctives — worde ("be / become") and geschiede ("be done") — in Uw naam *worde geheiligd; Uw wil geschiede*. Afrikaans, translating the very same text, has already shed them: it uses the perfectly ordinary modern verbs word (the everyday passive auxiliary, "be") and geskied ("happen / be done"), with no special ending at all.

So this most solemn, most conservative of texts — the one place you'd most expect an archaic verb form to survive — turns out to use plain Afrikaans verbs where Dutch keeps its subjunctive. There is no better illustration of how completely the mood has gone: even the liturgy could not preserve it.

Finally, the same archaic ware (old subjunctive of wees) that Dutch still uses freely survives in Afrikaans in essentially one frozen idiom:

As 't ware ("as it were") is a single lexical unit; the ware inside it is no longer a usable verb. Do not generalise it into other "if it were" sentences — for those you need sou or was … maar (below).

What everyday irrealis actually uses

So if the subjunctive is dead, how does a modern speaker say "if I were rich" or "I wish she were here"? Two living strategies do all the work:

1. sou + infinitive — the productive conditional. This is the real engine of Afrikaans irrealis and has its own page, the conditional, and conditional sentences.

2. was … maar — a fixed wish frame using the plain past was plus the particle maar ("if only"). This expresses an unrealisable wish, and crucially it uses the ordinary past tense of wees, not a special subjunctive.

Note what is happening: English reaches for the subjunctive were, but Afrikaans simply uses the everyday past was and lets the particle maar carry the "if only" meaning. The mood lives in the little word, not in the verb. That is the whole post-subjunctive logic of Afrikaans in miniature.

Common mistakes

Key takeaways

• Afrikaans has no productive subjunctive — one of the clearest signs of its grammatical simplification compared with Dutch.
• The mag-optative (Mag jy gelukkig wees) is the liveliest survivor: front mag, then subject, then plain verb — used in wishes, toasts, and blessings (formal / liturgical for the funeral ones).
• Lank lewe …!, Dit sy so, and as 't ware are frozen phrases — recognise them, do not generalise them; and note that even the Lord's Prayer uses ordinary word / geskied where Dutch still keeps its subjunctive worde / geschiede.
• The fossil sy also hides inside hetsy, danksy, samesyn, where no one feels a subjunctive any more.
• Real irrealis uses living machinery: sou + infinitive (the conditional) and the wish frame was … maar — the mood lives in maar, not in a special verb form.