Chichewa (also but less commonly known as Chinyanja, Chewa or Nyanja) is the main lingua franca of central and southern Malawi and neighbouring regions. Like other Bantu languages it has a wide range of tenses. In terms of time, Chichewa tenses can be divided into present, recent past, remote past, near future, and remote future. The dividing line between near and remote tenses is not exact, however. Remote tenses cannot be used of events of today, but near tenses can be used of events earlier or later than today.
The Chichewa tense system also incorporates aspectual distinctions. Except for the Present Simple, nearly every tense in Chichewa is either perfective (for example, "I went") or imperfective in aspect (for example "I was going", "I used to go"). In the present tense only, there is a distinction between habitual ("I usually go") and progressive ("I am going now").
Another aspectual distinction in Chichewa is that between perfect and past. A perfect tense is one which carries an implication that the result of a past action still holds at the present time, for example "he has come (and is still here)". The past tenses in Chichewa tend to be discontinuous, for example, "he came (but has now gone)". They differ from the English past tense, which is neutral in this regard.
The distinction between one tense and another in Chichewa is made partly by changing the tense-marker, which is an infix such as -ku-, -na-, -ma- etc. added to the verb, and partly by the use of tone. Often two different tenses, such as ndimapíta "I was going" and ndímapíta "I go", have the same tense-marker but are distinguished by their tonal pattern.
Compound tenses are also found in Chichewa to express more complex meanings, such as ndimatí ndipité "I was about to go" or ndakhala ndíkúpíta "I have been going".
In addition to ordinary tenses, Chichewa also has tenses to express obligation ("I should go"), potentiality ("I might go"), and persistence ("I am still going"). There are also tenses with meanings such as "while I am going", "after I had gone", "before I went", as well as a series of conditional-clause tenses meaning "if..." such as "if I go", "if I had gone", "if I were to go" and so on.
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