Is the subjunctive really rare? Not in Spanish

No, the subjunctive is not rare in Spanish: it is part of everyday speech. In 423 million words of Spanish film and television dialogue, sea, a form of "to be" that can only be subjunctive, is the 146th most common word, said 833 times per million words — more often than dinero ("money"). Fourteen unmistakable subjunctive forms of everyday verbs add up to about 2,900 per million, roughly one word in every 340. Italian and Brazilian Portuguese use it about as freely. French is the one where it looks rarer, partly because many French subjunctive forms look exactly like ordinary present-tense ones. English is where the idea of a "rare subjunctive" comes from.

Updated 11 October 2026 · 10 min read

Why people think the subjunctive is rare

English has a subjunctive, but you can hardly see it. It is just the plain form of the verb, in sentences like "I insist that he leave" or "it's vital that he be here", plus a handful of fixed phrases: "God save the King", "so be it", "be that as it may", "suffice it to say", "come what may". Grammarians even disagree about whether the were of "I wish she were here" belongs to it. One rare English subjunctive word does show up in our English subtitle list: lest is said about 2 times per million words.

So an English speaker comes to Spanish, French or Italian expecting a fancy extra. In these languages the subjunctive is a full set of verb forms, and ordinary sentences need it: quiero que vengas ("I want you to come"), penso che sia intelligente ("I think he's clever", in Italian), il faut qu'il comprenne ("he has to understand").

How we counted it

A word list can't see grammar, only spellings. So we counted only forms that cannot be anything but a subjunctive: sea is never "is" (that's es), tenga is never "has" (that's tiene). Forms that could be something else were left out, and each language had its traps:

• Spanish vaya is the subjunctive of ir ("go"), but ¡vaya! is also an interjection, "wow!" or "oh dear!". It is said 385 times per million, and there is no way to split the two uses, so it isn't in the table.
• Spanish fuera is "were" (si yo fuera, "if I were") but also "outside" and "out!".
• French soit is a subjunctive of être, but also a conjunction: soit … soit ("either … or"), "that is to say", and "so be it".
• Italian sia is a subjunctive of essere, and also sia … sia ("both … and"). Faccia is also the noun "face", and voglia is the noun "wish, desire".
• Portuguese seja is in the fixed phrase ou seja, "that is".

There is one more thing to know before reading the numbers. In Spanish and Portuguese, commands to usted or você and every negative command are made from subjunctive forms: no cantes ("don't sing"), no me digas ("you don't say"). Those are counted, because the form is the subjunctive form. That is part of the reason the subjunctive is so common.

Spanish: the most common subjunctive forms

Four more are just as everyday: esté (from estar, "be") at 212 per million, and the past subjunctives hubiera ("had", as in si lo hubiera sabido, "if I'd known") at 247, quisiera ("I would like") at 102 and pudiera ("could") at 93. These four and the ten in the table are the fourteen forms in the total above.

What the ratios say. For most verbs, the indicative is said six to twenty times as often as the subjunctive. That is a lot less than "rare": for every ten tiene there is about one tenga. And two rows break the pattern: hagas and digas are nearly as common as haces and dices. That is the negative command at work. No hagas eso ("don't do that") and no me digas use the subjunctive, and people in films say them all the time.

Compared with ordinary words. Sea is said more often than dinero (710 per million). Haya, pueda and tenga are each in the 600 most common words of the language. If you learn Spanish in frequency order, you meet the subjunctive within the first thousand words, whether or not your grammar book has got to it yet.

Sea and ser are a story of their own: why sea outnumbers esté is in ser vs estar, and para que ("so that"), which takes the subjunctive, is in por vs para.

Italian: just as common, and starting to slip

Counted over 247 million words. Fosse and abbia are each said more often than soldi ("money", 548 per million). (Fosse is also the plural of fossa, "pit", but that is not something people talk about much in films.) Sia, left out above, is the 83rd commonest word in Italian, 1,662 per million, even if some of those are "both … and".

One reason Italian uses it so much: it takes the subjunctive after "I think that". Penso che Davide sia intelligente has a subjunctive where French and Spanish would use the indicative. But there is also pressure in the other direction. Many Italians use the imperfect in place of the subjunctive and conditional in casual speech, as in se lo sapevo, andavo in spiaggia ("if I'd known, I'd have gone to the beach"). Grammar books call that wrong; it is common anyway. How the rest of Italian grammar compares is in is Italian hard to learn?

Portuguese: about as often as Spanish

Counted in 426 million words of Brazilian Portuguese subtitles. Tem ("has") is said about nine times for every tenha. Vá, venha and diga are commoner still (653, 493 and 531 per million), but they are also how you tell someone to go, come or speak, so we left them out. Portuguese also has a whole extra tense, the future subjunctive (quando eu for, "when I go"). Its forms and counts are in the most common Portuguese verbs, and when to use it is in is Portuguese grammar hard?.

French: harder to see

Counted in 318 million words. These are smaller numbers than in the other three languages, and it is tempting to say French uses the subjunctive less. The word list can't tell us that, because most French subjunctive forms are spelt exactly like the indicative. In il faut que je parle ("I have to speak"), parle is a subjunctive, but it is the same word as je parle, "I speak", so no count can find it. In every regular -er verb, the "I", "you", "he/she" and "they" forms are the same in both moods: parle, parles, parle, parlent. Only irregular verbs like avoir, faire and aller give themselves away, so the French subjunctive is certainly commoner than this table shows. Soit (566 per million) and sois (248, also the command "be!", as in sois sage) are left out.

French does have a subjunctive that has really died out in speech: the imperfect subjunctive. Fût ("were") is said 5 times per million and eût 3. Modern French uses the present subjunctive where older books used these. It went the same way as the passé simple, which has nearly vanished from dialogue too.

So is the subjunctive worth learning early?

In Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, yes. It is not a polish you add at an advanced level. A learner who can't recognise sea, haya and tenga will trip over them within the first few hundred words of real dialogue. In French you will hear it constantly after il faut que ("it is necessary that"), even where the spelling hides it.

• Learn it in phrases first. Que yo sepa ("as far as I know"), no me digas, cuando puedas ("when you can"), sea lo que sea ("whatever it is"): set phrases come before the rules.
• Learn the triggers in groups. Wishes, doubts and feelings are the usual triggers in all four languages.
• Notice the irregular ones. The forms that rank highest are from the most irregular verbs, so they are worth learning one by one.

Verbavia (our own course) teaches Spanish in frequency order, and the subjunctive is taught in hand-written lessons, with the grammar explained in English and reading, listening and writing sections. You can take the Spanish course free in any web browser, on a phone as well as a computer. You can browse the most common Spanish words or take the two-minute Spanish vocabulary test. Whether the rest of Spanish is as manageable is in is Spanish hard to learn?, and the verbs behind these forms are in the most common Spanish verbs.

Caveats

• Word forms, counted as written. Where a subtitle drops an accent, esté becomes este ("this") and is lost, so accented forms are a little undercounted.
• Commands are included. In Spanish and Portuguese, formal and negative commands are subjunctive forms; we did not try to separate them out.
• Subtitles are not all conversation. Some are translations of films first made in another language.
• Each language has its own corpus, so per-million rates compare well between languages and ranks less well.

Sources

• Lison, P. & Tiedemann, J. (2016). OpenSubtitles2016: Extracting Large Parallel Corpora from Movie and TV Subtitles. Proceedings of LREC 2016. aclanthology.org
• Dave, H. FrequencyWords: frequency lists from OpenSubtitles 2018 (es, it, pt_br, fr, en), content licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. github.com. The corpus sizes are computed by scripts/frequency_curves.py and printed from its output rather than typed; the ranks and per-million rates are our own count of the same lists: a form's rank is its line in the list, and its rate is its count divided by the total of all counts in the list.
• Wikipedia: English subjunctive: the plain-form subjunctive ("I insist that he leave", "it's crucial that he be here"), the fixed phrases, and the Cambridge Grammar treating "I wish she were here" as irrealis.
• Wikipedia: Subjunctive mood: French il faut qu'il comprenne cela; the Italian subjunctive after penso che, where French uses the indicative; Spanish -ra and -se past subjunctives (si yo fuera/fuese); the Portuguese future subjunctive.
• Wikipedia: Spanish grammar: quiero que seas muy ambicioso, the subjunctive after wanting.
• Wikipedia: Imperative mood: Spanish negative commands (no cantes) and usted commands made from the present subjunctive.
• Wikipedia: Portuguese conjugation: "for other persons, and for negative clauses, the present subjunctive takes the role of imperative".
• Wikipedia: Italian grammar: the imperfect for the subjunctive and conditional "frequent in colloquial speech", se lo sapevo, andavo in spiaggia; penso che Davide sia intelligente.
• Wikipedia: French verbs: parle "can be the 1st or 3rd person singular indicative or subjunctive form"; the imperfect subjunctive "only found in older and more literary works".
• Wiktionary: vaya (interjection), soit (conjunction, interjection), sois (subjunctive and imperative), sia (conjunction "both … and"), faccia and voglia (nouns), fosse (also plural of fossa), abbia, ait, ou seja ("that is"), fuera ("outside", "get out!"), no me digas ("you don't say"), que sepa ("as far as one knows"), sea lo que sea ("whatever it is").