English speakers can say "apparently it rained" if they did not see it. They can also just say "it rained" and leave the question open. In many languages that option does not exist — the verb itself must state whether you witnessed the event, inferred it, or were told.
Turkish marks it with a suffix
Turkish has two past tenses that differ only in evidence.
| Turkish | Suffix | English |
|---|---|---|
| Geldi. | -di | He came. (I saw it) |
| Gelmiş. | -miş | He came. (apparently — I was told, or I infer it) |
| Yağmur yağdı. | -di | It rained. (I saw) |
| Yağmur yağmış. | -miş | It rained. (the ground is wet, or someone said so) |
Choosing between them is compulsory. A Turkish speaker recounting something they did not witness must use -miş, and using -di instead would be a claim to have been there.
-miş is the storytelling tense. Because fairy tales and legends are by definition not witnessed, Turkish folk narrative runs in -miş throughout — the equivalent of English "once upon a time" is built into the grammar. It is also used for surprise at a newly discovered fact, and, pointedly, for distancing yourself from a claim.
Bulgarian and Macedonian do the same
Both Slavic languages developed a renarrative mood, marking that information is second-hand. It is the standard form in news reporting of claims the outlet is not vouching for, which makes the distinction politically consequential in a way English handles with attribution instead.
| Bulgarian | English |
|---|---|
| Той дойде. | He came. (witnessed) |
| Той дошъл. | He came. (reportedly) |
Quechua distinguishes three sources
| Suffix | Means | Use |
|---|---|---|
| -mi | direct | I saw or experienced it |
| -si | reported | someone told me |
| -chá | inferred | I deduce or suppose it |
Quechua speakers learning Spanish frequently report the absence of these markers as a real gap — Spanish forces them to assert things flatly without indicating how they know, which feels to them like overclaiming.
The systems vary in size
| Distinctions | Example languages |
|---|---|
| Two — witnessed vs not | Turkish, Bulgarian |
| Three — direct, reported, inferred | Quechua, Aymara |
| Four or more — including hearsay and sensory type | several Amazonian languages |
Some Amazonian systems distinguish seeing from hearing from smelling as separate evidential categories, and a few require marking whether hearsay came from a named source or general talk.
Japanese sits in between
Japanese is not usually classed as having full grammatical evidentiality, but it has a rich set of forms that do similar work and are used very consistently:
| Japanese | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 雨だ | It's raining. (direct) |
| 雨らしい | It seems to be raining — I heard |
| 雨のようだ | It appears to be raining — from evidence |
| 雨そうだ | It looks like rain / I hear it's raining |
These are optional in principle and close to obligatory in practice, since a bare assertion about something you have not verified sounds presumptuous.
Why it matters for learners
Speakers of evidential languages learning English often sound overconfident without meaning to, because English gives them no way to mark second-hand information as routinely as their own language does — and adding apparently to every sentence sounds odd.
English speakers learning Turkish have the opposite problem: they default to -di for everything past, which quietly claims eyewitness status for events they only heard about. It is not ungrammatical, which is why it goes uncorrected, and it is one of the more persistent errors in otherwise fluent speech.
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Open the dictionary appFrequently asked questions
What is evidentiality?
A grammatical category marking the speaker's source of information — whether they witnessed something, inferred it, or were told about it. Around a quarter of the world's languages mark it obligatorily, meaning you cannot form a sentence without specifying it.
Does English have evidentiality?
Not grammatically. English can express the same information with words like apparently, reportedly and evidently, but these are optional additions. In a language with grammatical evidentiality, the marking is built into the verb and cannot be left out.
Which languages mark evidentiality?
Turkish, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Georgian, Quechua, Aymara, Tibetan, Japanese to a degree, and a great many languages of the Amazon and of the Pacific Northwest. Some systems distinguish two sources, others five or more.