Asian Languages
Past tenses are found in a variety of Asian languages. These include the Indo-European languages Russian in North Asia and Persian, Tajik, Urdu, and Hindi in Southwest and South Asia; the Turkic languages Turkish, Turkmen, Kazakh, and Uyghur of Southwest and Central Asia; Arabic in Southwest Asia; Japanese; the Dravidian languages of India; the Uralic languages of Russia; Mongolic; and Korean. Languages in East Asia and Southeast Asia typically do not distinguish tense; in Mandarin Chinese, for example, the particle δΊ†le when used immediately after a verb instead indicates perfective aspect.
In parts of islands in Southeast Asia, even less distinction is made, for instance in Indonesian and some other Austronesian languages. Past tenses, do, however, exist in most Oceanic languages.
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