Past Tenses in Serbian language, and modern trends of their use

The Serbian language, as one of the South Slavic languages, belongs to the larger Slavic group of the Indo-European languages. Because of the ongoing controversy about the usage of its system of past tenses, I have decided to explain it in detail. Beware that this article is not intended to explain the morphology of Serbian Past Tenses in detail, its main objective is to explain their meanings, their history and trends of their use.

Although today's grammar books state that the standard Serbian language nominally has four Past Tenses, system of past tenses in Serbian language is characterized by high level of Diglossia1. Because the High Form of the Language uses Past Tenses System imported from Russian language, which contains only one past Tense, only that one is allowed in any form of official and public use. This mandatory Past Tense is officially called either "the Perfect" or “the Past Tense”, although its name is to a great extent misleading and wrong, as shall be explained in more detail later in this article. The remaining three – the Aorist, the Imperfect and the Pluperfect – are part of the Low Form of the Language and are included in the grammar for reasons of backward compatibility, but are officially considered as superfluous, rustic, and undesirable. As such, they are subject to regular removal and replacement with “The Past Tense” from statements of people in courts, newspapers and such, when their statements need to be written down.2 Their use is not outright forbidden, but is strongly discouraged.

Important note: as in all Slavic languages, verbs in Serbian are divided in two classes: verbs of perfective aspect (for finished actions) and verbs of imperfective aspect (for continuous actions). This division in the Slavic languages is more important than any Tense, so several Tenses in Serbian (both Low and High forms) have different meanings for verbs of different aspects (for example, the "Present Tense of perfective verbs” has nothing to do with the Present, it has more to do with the Past or Future). The Aorist has a preference for the verbs of perfective aspect, and Imperfect for the verbs of imperfective aspect, although in the traditional (Low Form) Serbian System of Past Tenses they can be used with the opposite aspect as well, but with a slightly different meaning.

When we analyse the system of Past Tenses in the Serbian language, because of Diglossia, we must distinguish between today's modern official and public use, and the traditional and colloquial use. In this regard, there are two competing Past Tenses Systems in Serbia. The First one is the native Serbian System of Past Tenses (Low Form in Serbian Diglossia). The second is the Yugoslav (Serbo-Croat) simplified System of Past Tenses, which was imported from Russian language (High Form in Serbian Diglossia).

In the simplified modern standard Serbian language, only the (Present-)Perfect Tense (“the Past Tense”) is allowed, a situation which is inherited from the former standard Serbo-Croat language of the former communist Yugoslavia. All other Past Tenses are deemed obsolete and are de facto banned from any official or public use. The Yugoslav (Serbo-Croat) Past Tenses System (in High Form of the Language) thus contains only one Past Tense. It should thus be no surprise to anyone that, since the communists took the power in the former Yugoslavia in 1945, the terms "Perfect Tense" and "Past Tense" (“прошло време”) have tended to be used as synonyms, especially in the school system4.

In the previous chart you can see examples of both Diglossia and language censorship, in south-eastern serbian city of Vranye (Врање – Vranje) and town Vlasotince (Власотинце), whose populations are well known for use of the native Serbian Past Tenses System. And for city of Kragujevac, situated in the centre of Serbia.

On the left side you can see statistics for five people - natives of those places, of usage of tenses used for describing past events. Statistics was made in 2021 by me, by recording of several hours of their free, casual speech at home for analysis.

The Vranye group (A) in chart represents statistics of what was written by journalists themselves (9 of them in total), and Vranye group (B) represents statistics of what reportedly said 20 local people that were interviewed in those articles. As we can see from the first two right-side statistics, it is obvious that the language of both journalists and interviewed people was either censored or self-censored (most probably both), in order to remove (real) past tenses from it. The middle group on the right represents similar statistics, but from the local Newspaper in Vlasotince (where censorship seems to be strongest), and last two are from Kragujevac6. Similar situation, more or less, is in all other places in Serbia.

Interestingly, our language authorities, through media and school system, use term “the genuine language of the people” for what you see on the right of previous image. What you see on the left, they deem “irregular” language, “corrupted” language, or “dialect” at best.

Today the (Present-)Perfect Tense is de facto mandatory in any official, formal or public communication (newspapers, television news, subtitles for foreign movies, other mass media, institutions of the state, schools, professional use at workplace, product tutorials, school and academic textbooks, history books, internet sites (like Wikipedia in Serbian), publications by the Serbian Academy of Sciences7...). Although the other three Past Tenses are not prohibited “de jure”, they are prohibited de facto. And all this is just a continuation of the practices from the former communist-era Yugoslavia8.

For most native Serbian speakers, the meanings of the four Past Tenses lay somewhere between these two extremes, depending on their education, social status, employment, age, dialect, and place of residence (city/countryside). The older, less educated, rural living, lower status, religious, unemployed (simply said, more conservative) people tend to use them in a way closer to their traditional (Low Form) meaning, since they usually use much more of the three undesirable Past Tenses in colloquial speech (that way, they form some kind of “linguistic underground”).

The following table contains short explanations of their meanings, including small examples.

The table shows how circumlocution can be used to render the meaning of the three undesirable tenses when substituting them with the mandatory (Present-)Perfect.

On the Serbian State Television, even the subtitled foreign movie translations use the Perfect Tense always and exclusively; no translator wants to be branded 'illiterate', and will not risk losing his job or reputation by using any of the 'inappropriate' Past Tenses.

The other three tenses are tolerated in the colloquial speech, fiction literature, song lyrics, and to an extent in movies and TV series. In fact, they are tolerated only in the contexts where features of Serbian dialects are tolerated. This is yet another proof that the Aorist, Imperfect and Pluperfect are de facto treated as dialectal features, although they are officially part of the Serbian grammar (and that of the former standard Serbo-Croat language). In fact, in many instances they are treated even worse, e.g. in some TV series where dialectal features are commonly used, the three Tenses are completely absent, so as not to remind the TV viewers that they even exist. An example is "The White Ship" (“Бела лађа”) from 2006-2012, a comedy show by the Serbian State Television, whose two main characters are natives of a town called Vlasotince in the southeastern Serbia. They speak with an exaggerated accent and dialectal features of their region, except for the three past Tenses, which are absent from their speech, although all three are in fact ubiquitous in the local vernacular to such a degree that, for the perfective verbs, Aorist is even more frequent than the Perfect Tense.

In Serbian schools, especially in rural areas and small towns, where Aorist is more frequent, children are regularly corrected and in many instances rebuked for their use of Aorist, Imperfect or Pluperfect, forcing them to speak High-Status “Tarzan-style”. It is a well-known fact that rural and small town children use Aorist less frequently once they start going to school. I have noticed several such cases, as have many other parents.

"Петровић је убијен зато што је почео сметати мафији."

Literal translation to English: "Petrovic was murdered because he has started to inconvenience the mafia."

This must sound odd to a native English speaker. This is because in the modern High Form, simplified standard Serbian language, the use of (Present-)Perfect is mandatory, although the Pluperfect would sound more natural ("Петровић је убијен зато што је био почео сметати мафији."). To many Serbian speakers, this newspaper sentence also sounds odd, even to some living in Belgrade. They understand it as a dead man starting to do something right now, and they wonder, how can a dead man start doing anything? This is an excellent example of what the mandatory simplification of Past Tenses System leads to.

In Serbia, not knowing the difference in meaning between (Present-)Perfect Tense and Pluperfect Tense is correlated with higher education. In my research with 92 respondents, those who were not able to differentiate the meanings of those two Tenses are found predominantly among people with high education. Correlation coefficient is 1.57. You can see the results in the next chart. To make things worse, among those not knowing the difference is one of two interviewed school teachers of Serbian language.

In previous chapter, it have been written about Diglossia in Serbian language, and about usage of its both past tenses systems. But there was not a single word said how actually this Diglossia originated. I shall try here to describe how it happened.

The story begins in the first half of 18th century in Austrian (Habsburg) Empire, where among other etnicities (Germans, Hungarians, Croats, Czechs, Slovaks, Romanians...) also some Serbs lived (who are Orthodox Christians, like Greeks, Russians, Bulgarians, Romanians, Ukrainians...). At that time, Serbs in Habsburg Empire were not allowed to print books in their own language and in their own cyrillic alphabet (Habsburg Government by that measure wanted to compel them to accept Catholicism and learn from state-supported catholic books).

Serbs in Habsburg Empire then turned towards Russia, asking russian Tzar to send them books, from which their children could be educated. Russians responded by sending many books (written in russian language, ofcourse), but also by sending teachers, which opened several schools in what is now Voivodina region of Serbia (I really do not understand how Habsburg authorities had allowed such foreign-sponsored schools to work in their own territory?).

Serbian children in those schools were taught not in Serbian but in Russian language. The consequence of it was that language of upper classes of Serbs living in Habsburg Empire became mixture of Serbian and Russian languages (both are Slavic languages, and mutually intelligible to some degree, but nevertheless distinct).

Influence of Russian language onto language of educated Serbs was not only in Vocabulary, it was also strong in the Writing system, Grammar, Phonology and Syntax. And that became the source of today's Simplified Past Tenses System: educated Austrian Serbs, imitating the Russians, thought it fashionable to use Russian Past Tenses System instead of Serbian one, together with several other grammatical features of Russian Language10. And it soon became the norm in all formal and administative use (primarily in schools and church administration). That way the language of Austrian Serbs became heavily russified, especially of their better educated upper class. That language even had the name, it was called “Slavonic-Serbian”11.

Nevertheless, most of Serbs at that time lived just south of the border of Habsburg Empire, on the northwest limits of Ottoman Empire, and, since they were almost all illiterate, the Hi form of language of their educated northern brethern living in Habsburg Empire had no influence on them. Until year 1804, from when big parts of todays Serbia gradually acquired Autonomy from Ottomans. Serbian Autonomy in Ottoman Empire during the first half of 19th Century was slowly building up it's institutions, relying on massive participation of Austrian Serbs, who were due to their education (and ability to read and write, unlike their southern brethern12) heavily involved in their administration, schools and all other newly created institutions. That way, heavilly russified “Slavonic-Serbian” Language of higher classes of Austrian Serbs became the norm in new Serbian State13. Official correspondence between all kinds of clerks, civil servants and all other state officials had to be carried out in that language. And that is the way how the native Serbian Past Tenses System became replaced with the Past Tenses System of Russian Language in official use in Serbia, up to this day.

Sometimes newly employed civil servants at the beginning of their career used normal Serbian language in official correspondence, but very soon they would have learned how to write (and speak) in the hybrid “Slavonic-Serbian Language”, which was preferred by their superiors.

I will show here two examples from the same person, Arangel Milosavlyevich, who was one of state officials in town of Yagodina during the first half of 19th century. Next two are excerpts from his official messages to the Ruler of Serbia, Knyaz Milosh Obrenovich. The first is from year 1822, in the beginning of his career, writen in normal Serbian Language, which contains no russian influence of any kind at all, and is written in native Serbian System of Past Tenses (underlined verbs - all witnessed actions are described by Aorist and Imperfect Tenses, which did not exist in contemporary Russian language).

“Ја ваш покорни слуга не пропуштам вама покорно јавити како ономад дођоше 8 Арнаута из Голак ишту да иду у Београд. Ја им потражи тескеру нису имали врати ги натраг. Они отишли у Ћуприји казали ћуприском војводе и бинбаше како смо иј вратили натраг зашто нису имали тескеру. Ондак дали им тескеру војвода и бинбаша ћуприски јучер па дођоше код јагодинског војводе и он искаше ди и пусти, ја не дадо но их па натраг врати(с)мо.”

The second official correspondence (from year 1837) written in Slavonic-Serbian Language by the same man contains numerous russian words14 (in red), beside those which are purely Serbian (in green), and those which can be both, since they are either names or equal in both languages (black). And in it, ofcourse, was not used native Serbian Past Tenses System, but Russian.

"Сви житељи с глубочајшим страхопочитанијем светли скут љубећи, всеподанејше благодаре Вашој Светлости на књажеском поздраву и отеческом о њима попеченију и сва је варош као наново оживела сад известивши се да је Ваша Светлост имала заповест издати, да спутник г. доктора Нађа, латов Коста Јовановић у Јагодину поврати се"

Nevertheless, during the same time, outside of administrative and official use, spoken and written Serbian was much less influenced by Russian language. Which is visible in serbian Literature and even private correspondence, where russian words were scarce and native Serbian Past Tenses System was ubiquitous. Even Knyaz Milosh Obrenovich, who overwhelmingly used Russian P. T. System in his official correspondence, did not use it in his Memoirs. Those times saw Diglossia at the most pronounced.

Partial derussification of Serbian language began in 1860s, when most of Russian words were replaced either by serbian, or western European ones15. Most russian grammatical influences too were gone, except the Russian Past Tenses System (which, to repeat, is a subset of the native Serbian Past Tenses System), which has been still kept in the official use, up to this day. Despite Serbian officials in state administration continued to use Russian P.T. System, in other uses, such as declarations to the Serbian people, and in school teachings, native Serbian P.T. System was still used up to the communist seizure of power in 1940s, not Russian.

The Emphasis of the Aorist Tense is exclusively on a past action, unlike the Present Perfect, which describes a state. To be more specific, the Aorist in Serbian denotes an action performed at a specific time in the past, which was witnessed or experienced in some way by the speaker. Among the Past Tenses, Aorist had been the mainstay of the Serbian language for centuries, both in colloquial and literary use. For example, the Aorist comprises 63% of all Past Tense occurrences in Vuk Karadzic's Serbian Folk Songs collection from the first half of the 19th Century.

It is worth noticing that the Aorist is shorter than the Perfect (because the former is inflected and the latter is periphrastic), and therefore more economical both in speech and writing.

I have found on internet interesting work (from year 2010, in english language) about language acquisition of small children in Serbia.16 The author noticed that children start using Aorist Tense several months before Present-Perfect Tense – which is in a strong contradiction with official stance that aorist is a “archaic” tense, not used by people.

Since the emergence of mass media in the 19th century, the Perfect Tense, being preferred past tense in the institutions of the state, and more neutral than the Aorist, has started gaining ground and gradually became the main past tense in newspapers. But even then the Aorist retained its status as the main Past Tense in the colloquial and literary use with perfective verbs in most parts of Serbia. In the first half of the 20th century, the Aorist was used in all Serbian dialects in Yugoslavia, and was very frequent in most of them (in most of Serbia south of the Sava and Danube rivers, in Montenegro, Herzegovina, and in most of Bosnia). To this day, this is evident in Serbian graveyards, where tombstone inscriptions up to 1945 (mostly verbs like "died", 'killed", "lived"...) were mostly in the Aorist, rather than the Perfect Tense.

The above chart shows statistics of the past tense usage on tombstones between years 1901 – 1942 (immediately before the communists came to power) of seven village graveyards in Serbia. The first village is just 15 km away from the centre of Belgrade, the capital of Serbia. And we can see that the incidence of Aorist there (48%) is not even close to be 'archaic'. Villages third and fourth, with an overwhelming use of Aorist (over 80%), are located about 103 and 110 km south of Belgrade, and about 10 km from the geographical centre of Serbia (near Kragujevac). On this chart we can see something that is an already known fact, namely that there is a north-south cline, where the use of Aorist generally grows in the southern direction.

http://nevgen.org/DesktopImages/Aorist_in_court_record_Serbia_1936.png

The above figure shows an official court record from 1936, just five years before the Nazi Germany invaded the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and triggered a Civil War which was won by the Communists. The record is from the town court of Kragujevac, in central Serbia. There are three verbs in the Aorist Tense (underlined in red), and all of them refer to actions witnessed in the court room. All other actions mentioned in the record are in the Perfect Tense, as they have not been witnessed by the court scribe. After the Communists took over the state, the Aorist Tense can be hardly seen in court records.

During the same period, the majority of Croatian dialects had no Aorist at all (for example, all of the Kajkavian and most of the Chakavian dialect groups), and in most of the rest the Aorist was not very frequent. Major Croat population centres like Zagreb (the capital), Rijeka, Pula, Varazdin, Bjelovar, Split, Sibenik, Zadar and even Dubrovnik were in aorist-free areas. The Aorist was only common among the Croatian population in parts of Herzegovina and central Bosnia.

With the creation of Yugoslavia in 1918, the Serbs were no longer on their own. The Serbs and the Croats became two dominant ethnicities in the new state. Heavy use of Aorist in the Serbian population became an obstacle for the linguistic unification of Serbs and Croats. To solve this problem, Serbian linguist Aleksandar Belic, in his 1933 grammar book of the wanna-be-unified Serbo-Croatian language, for the first time restricted the meaning of Aorist to actions that happened "immediately before the moment of speech"17. He also in the same book explained his plans to restrict the meaning and usage of Aorist because of the "existence of a great part of people in Yugoslavia who rarely use Aorist, or do not use it at all". He did not mention the Croatian people, but it is obvious that they were the reason for such restrictions. In his time few, if any Serbo-Croatian dialects used the Aorist in an even remotely similar manner. Neither does the Aorist have such a meaning in the closely related Macedonian and Bulgarian languages.

This newly defined meaning of Aorist is contradicted, for example, by hundreds of thousands of Aorist samples in History books (and all other kinds of books) in Serbia up to 1945, and by regular use of Aorist on tombstone inscriptions in Serbia up to 1945, which were usually inscribed several months after the death. Also, I have had chance to examine Past Tenses usage in 9 letters written in 1876 by King Peter I Karadjordjevic18. They contained 58 samples of Aorist Tense, but only two of them (3.45%) were used for actions that happened "immediately before the moment of speech".

Recently I found in a book oral narrative of serbian peasant Petar Jokic, written down in year 1851 word-by-word by another man, 68 pages in total. Peasant was from village Topola, about 80 km south of Belgrade. He was from the same village and close aide of Karadjordje Petrovic, the leader of 1804 Serbian Uprising, and founder of Karadjordjevic dynasty. His exact words were recorded by historian because he knew much details about Uprising and consequent war against Ottoman Empire which lasted up to 1813. Aorist usage in his narrative among four past tenses amounted to 61.14%, and today's "The Past Tense" (or Perfect) has participation of no more than 35.86%. Also, all those Aorist Tense verbs were used to describe actions which had happened more than 40 years ago, contradicting the restrictions of Aleksandar Belic.

Belic's drive to officially restrict the use of Aorist was not widely accepted by the linguistic circles of the pre-communist Yugoslavia (grammar books from the pre-communist-era did not follow his recommendation). The change only took place once the communist regime was established in Yugoslavia in 1945. The communists, especially those from the aorist-free areas of Croatia, considered the Aorist as reactionary, churchly, and reminiscent of the Serbian peasantry, which was deemed conservative and backward. Under the rule of the Communist Party, whose leader was comrade Josip Broz Tito (a Croat from an aorist-free area in the Northwestern Croatia), the deaoristization of language became systematic, albeit silent, and was dramatically accelerated. In all grammar books, the definition of Aorist was officially restricted to actions which occurred "immediately before the moment of speech", despite opposition from some Serbian linguists, like Petar Sladojevic. Even in such a highly restricted fashion, the Aorist was not mandatory – the communist-era grammar books did not state that the Aorist should be used for such actions, they merely stated that it could be used. Under the communists, even this restricted use of Aorist was undesirable. Thus the Aorist had been scrapped and sacrificed at the altar of Serbo-Croatian language unity.

Another problem with such a restricted definition of the Aorist was its ambiguity. How long (seconds? minutes?) is the "immediately before the moment of speech" time period? The communists did not offer an answer to this question. The prevailing opinion is that it was left ill-defined on purpose, so its use can be easily curtailed.

Under the communist rule, the Aorist also became undesirable in History books (in the pre-communist Yugoslavia, the Aorist was regularly used in this genre) as well as in all other academic works. With the advent of Television, the Aorist was banned from foreign movie translations, even though it would be a better fit than the 'Tarzan-style' that resulted from the mandatory 100% (Present-)Perfect Tense use. The Aorist was even considered undesirable in comic strips.

The above chart shows Past Tense usage statistics in four history books, depicting four wars, each written by a participating army officer. The first two were written in the pre-communist era; the third and fourth date from the communist era, and were published by the communist Yugoslav People's Army. The third book has 420 pages, with about 7,000 instances of the (Present-)Perfect Tense, 23 instances of the Pluperfect, and 0 (zero) instances of the Aorist and Imperfect Tenses. Five people co-edited the book after its author's death, so I believe the Aorist and Imperfect usage was possibly censored.

The fourth book is the most important of all, because its author was a native of the Southeastern Serbia, and a WW2 participant in the same region. Even though the Aorist Tense has remained the most frequent Past Tense to this day in this region, with the Imperfect Tense also frequent, the book was almost completely devoid of both: on 570 pages it has about 8450 instances of the Perfect, 26 instances of Pluperfect, zero Imperfects, and only 5 instances of the Aorist. Furthermore, none of the five instances of the Aorist were written by the author, they all appeared between quotation marks (“”), as they were quoted from original WW2 documents. The book is thus another proof that the communist regime had censored newly written books in order to remove the Aorist Tense and replace it with the (Present-)Perfect Tense, as it is hard to believe that a native of the Southeastern Serbia would have written the book in such a Tarzan-style.

Another good example is a book which contains translations into standard Serbo-Croat of the WW2 documents from Macedonian partisans19. Thousands of Aorist and Imperfect instances were removed and replaced with the mandatory (Present-)Perfect Tense by the communist Yugoslav People’s Army’s editors. Not a single one was left intact. This is known because the book contains many images of the original documents.

Aorist Tense was also censored from statements of people when they were interrogated by secret services of Communist-Era Yugoslavia, like OZNA/UDBA20. I have found in several books21 published statements of 80 interrogated peasants from Montenegro and Serbia, all of them from high aorist-usage areas. Those 80 peasants were interrogated by OZNA/UDBA secret service in years 1944-1946. Their alleged statements contain 2517 instances of Present-Perfect, and only 18 samples of Aorist (0.71%), which is impossible to be their original speech due to too low Aorist percentage. These statements written down by OZNA are the proof that peasants' statements were intentionally censored on large scale to remove the Aorist Tense (and other real past tenses) and replace them with Present-Perfect. In early years of Communist-Era Yugoslavia OZNA was the equivalent of Stalin's NKVD or Hitler's Gestapo. OZNA's main job was prosecution of non-communists and pro-democracy opposition, which they implemented through the Yugoslav version of 'Red Terror' with summary executions, usually extrajudicial.

In the previous chart we can see the structure of Tenses used to describe past events in statements of three groups of peasants from village Velika in Montenegro, published in three different books, two of them from the Communist Era. Despite all statements are written in the first person singular, we can see that statements in the first two books were censored by communists in order to minimise or completely remove all Tenses except the Present-Perfect Tense, thus converting it into the High Form of Language. The third book contains original, uncensored statements, written in Low Form of Language. As we mentioned before, in serbian courts, newspapers and other mass media, removal of aorist and other (real) past tenses from statements of people is the regular procedure.

In the previous chart we can see graph about usage of Aorist Tense in 20 general history books, total number of instances of Aorist Tense which were written by the authors (instances of Aorist in quotations from earlier books and other sources are excluded, because they were not written by authors themselves). The first ten books are all from the Era before communists took power in Yugoslavia. Eight of them are “History of Serbs” or ”History of Serbian people”, all which I could find. In the second group of ten books, nine are from the Era of communists' rule, and one which was published after its demise. Books are sorted by year of publishing. There is only one “History of Serbian people” in the second group, started to be published in 1981 part-by-part, because such books were not allowed until our ex-dictator comrad Josip Broz died in 1980 and communism had started falling apart. As we can see, the last book of Democratic Era contains 1,862 instances of Aorist Tense22. Only one of Communism-Era books contains relevant number of Aorist Tense instances (125), and interestingly, majority of them were written by Croatian authors, in sections dedicated to History of Croatian people. Being written by numerous academic historians of several Yugoslavian Universities, this book somehow managed to bypass strict language censorship of the Communist Party.

Interestingly, during the years 1941-1944 of WW2 and parallel civil war in Yugoslavia between communists and supporters of Democracy&Monarchy, communists regularly used Aorist in their Declarations to the public or in their propaganda leaflets aimed at ethnic Serb population in Serbia, Montenegro, Bosna, Herzegovina and even Croatia, in which they were flattering Serbs and persuading them to join their ranks or help them with food or other resources. Aorist was used to make it closer to the language of ordinary Serbs, which were overhelmingly rural and low- or no- educated. Once communists' grip to power had been consolidated in late 1944, Aorist dissapeared from their communication with the population. Instead of flattering, that was the time for starting of mass executions across Serbia.

Being banned from the mass media, and any formal and public use, the Aorist found its refuge in the rural and semi-rural small-town areas of Serbia, mostly among the uneducated, older or unemployed parts of the population, who were less affected by the modern ways and the policy of deaoristization.

Today the Aorist, along with the Pluperfect and in some places even the Imperfect has the greatest frequency of use in villages and small towns (even the Serbian Academy of Sciences, in whose publications the Aorist is not welcome, admits that the Aorist, despite decades of efforts to suppress it, is even today the most frequent past tense in some parts of Serbia, for example in the southeast23), and among less educated people who moved from rural areas to cities. It is important to notice that they use the Aorist so frequently because they do not conform to the newly introduced restriction "immediately before the moment of speech", but also use it regularly for non-recent actions, as Aorist has been used for centuries. They use it mostly in colloquial speech, with family members and other well-known people with whom they feel more at ease. When speaking in more tense and formal situations, for example with doctors, teachers, clerks, the police, or even TV reporters!, or with people they do not know, they avoid the Aorist, since they instinctively know that it and the other two Tenses are Taboo, rude and undesirable, or even shameful and is a sign of lower social status (in fact, in such situations they try to mimic the way of speech of persons of higher social status).

In Serbia it is normal that siblings, raised in the same household, have different patterns of Aorist use, depending on their education and employment. Those with a higher education, who are employed and have moved to a big city, try to show their higher social status and therefore use the Aorist or Pluperfect less in their speech. But their less educated siblings, who have remained in their home village, tend to use the undesirable Past Tenses more regularly, just like they had learned from their parents, especially within the circle of family and close friends. I know of many such cases, one of them is the case of my mother and her brother.

In the Macedonian language, which became standardized in the 20th century, the Aorist is by no means restricted. In contrast to the former Serbo-Croatian language, the Aorist in Macedonian is seeing regular use in mass media, schools and institutions of the state, and is allowed to retain its status of the main Past Tense for verbs of the perfective aspect. Until the communists rose to power in 1945, Macedonian was considered a Serbian dialect. In today's Serbian mass media, when citing statements from North Macedonian politicians, the Aorist is always substituted with the Perfect Tense. Serbian journalists do not allow anyone to use the Aorist, not even Macedonians, whose language is similar and mutually intelligible with Serbian.

Here I shall give a small example about modern attitude towards use of Aorist in working places and in public. Several years ago (I think it was in 2012), I added on my working place a single verb in Aorist Tense into our Software product. Several days later, my boss noticed it, and he was shocked to see Aorist in written form. He was so upset that he yelled at me something like "Are you crazy?", and then he said the next sentence, which I have never forget, "What would our customers think of our company if they happen to see Aorist in our program?". Later he forgave me my 'insolence' of using Aorist in written form, but I was warned never again to do something like this. As we can see from this example, public use of Aorist in Serbia today is much like running naked on the street.

Judging by his reaction, readers might think my boss does not use Aorist Tense at all in his speech. But that is not true, I hear him on daily basis to use Aorist with me and other colleagues. But, he never uses it in spoken or written conversation with our customers, nor in front of them. Because he cares for reputaton of the Company we are working for, in such cases he uses only prestigious Tarzan-Style.

Administrators of Wikipedia in Serbian language also do not allow use of Aorist Tense in ordinary text on its pages24, not even in the pages about places in southeastern or southwestern Serbia, where Aorist Tense is even today in widespread use. The only exception are rare quotations from books published before communists came to power (before 1945). In such rare cases, Aorist on Serbian Wikipedia's pages occurs under quotation marks.

I know of a case from 2002, when an author of a novel in Serbia (he does not want his name to be published) had problems with his publisher and their language editor, because the novel contained some verbs in the Aorist Tense. They demanded the replacement of Aorist with the mandatory (Present-)Perfect Tense, but the author refused, even if it meant the book would not be published. After several days of dispute, the book was finally published with the Aorist in place. The same novel was later nominated for an annual “best novel” prize. Certain members of the jury also complained about the Aorist Tense verbs, and the novel was taken out of consideration for the prize.

It should be noticed that today certain linguists and teachers of the Serbian language are not content with the policy of deaoristization and would like to stop and reverse it, but the mainstream supports it, stating that the Aorist is an "archaic" Tense (which is a lie). Even the pro-monarchist party called “ПОКС“ (“Покрет обнове Краљевине Србије” - “Movement for renewal of Kingdom of Serbia”, poks.rs) strictly adheres to communist's “no-aorist” policy in their declarations and pronouncements to the public. Today, Serbian Orthodox Church is the only institution of the Serbian people that to some degree supports the use of Aorist (together with Imperfect and Pluperfect) and does not follow the communist-era prescribed rules.

And for the end of Section about Aorist, here is small comparision of Serbian Aorist and German Preterite Tense (by the way, Aorist and Imperfect are called “preterital tenses” on regular basis in serbian linguistic publications).

There is also another simple tense in the Serbian language (but only in it's Low form of Serbian Diglossia) that is often (very often!) used to describe the past. That tense is not easy to name, since it is

usually neglected and overlooked in the grammar books. I sometimes call it "Para-aorist", but I doubt any other calls it that way. "Preterite" might be also very good name for it (also I never heard anyone call it that way), but that is how we shall call it in this section.

This tense has the same set of endings like the Present Tense (which is the present tense only for imperfective verbs in all Slavic languages). But our Preterite has nothing to do with the present, because it uses perfective verbs only. Just like it is the case for perfective verbs in all other Slavic languages: Russian, Ukrainian, Whiterussian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Slovene; all have this kind of Tense (simple tense for perfective verbs which has the same endings as the Present Tense), but in all of them it is one of the forms of the Future Tense, not Past! In Serbian, it is not that way. Yes, sometimes it can be even in Serbian used for Future, like in the next sentence:

"Ја сутра одем на посао." ("Tommorow I go to job"), but such future use in independent clauses is very, very strange and unusual in Serbian.

Beware that perfective verbs with Present-Tense endings in dependent clauses are outside of scope of this article, in which it can serve quite different purpose, for example: "Хоћу да то урадиш сутра" - "I want you to do it tommorow". Or it might be used as a substitute for infinitive.

Now we shall compare usage of both imperfective and perfective verbs with the endings of the Present Tense with the next simple example.

"Јa правим хлеб и колаче у пекари." ("I make bread and cakes in bakery.")

The previous sentence is perfectly understandable to anyone, even if it is said outside of any context (even if I approach an unknown man on the street and tell him the sentence). Just because it uses the

But what happens if we change imperfective verb form first person singular "правим" to its equivalent perfective verb form "направим"?

The second, previous sentence, if said outside of any context, is meaningless and confusing to any speaker of Serbian language. In this case, if I happen to approach any unknown man on the street and tell him just this sentence, he would think that I am either drunk or mentally sick. It cannot even be translated to english.

But, in what contexts is it meaningful? In contexts of narratives. Beside aorist, the Preterite is also excelent for such story-telling. Usually, two of them are used in narrative interchangeably, aorist more often for witnessed actions, and Preterite is more suited for unwitnessed. But line between them is much blurred now. Nevertheless, there is one use when Preterite cannot be substituted neither by aorist nor by Present-Perfect Tense: for habitual actions, which repeat over time. Like in this example: "Лопов разбије излог, уђе у продавницу и изнесе робу." - "Thief smashes a shop window, enters a store and takes out the goods." But such uses for repeated or habitual actions are much less frequent then use in narratives.

Unlike Aorist and Present-Perfect, Preterite is a kind of incomplete tense. It cannot be used in interrogative sentences, just like it cannot be used outside of narratives. That might be the reason why it is ignored in grammar books, and has no official name.

Aorist and Preterite in many cases in written form have the same forms in third person singular (in the previous example forms "уђе" and "изнесе" can be both Tenses). That is one of reasons why I sometimes call the Preterite "Para-aorist". But in spoken language they are almost always distinguished by accent.

Preterite was very frequent in history books (and many other kinds of books) before communists came to power in 1945. Since 1945, it has disappeared from history books and books of similar Genres completely, just like Aorist did. But communists were not successful in driving it out of spoken, vernacular language (with Aorist they had some success, especially in big cities). In informal, vernacular Serbian, our Preterite Tense is ubiquitous and unavoidable in story telling. One reason for it is that it benefited from persecution of Aorist, taking over part of it's area of use. You can hear it everywhere, in the bus, on the street, in the family circles, in villages, in small towns, in big cities, even in the center of Belgrade. But in Serbia it is more probable to meet an Alien from the Outer Space than to hear the Preterite Tense on the Television News. It shares the fate of Aorist and other past tenses in High form of Serbian Language, where it is not welcome.

Since communists came to power in Serbia in 1945, this Tense have been officially called either “Perfect Tense” or “(the) Past Tense”. But before 1945, this Tense was in many Grammar books also called “Present Perfect”; after 1945 never was called this way.

In the English language, the use of the Present Perfect Tense sometimes might be incorrect, like in this sentence: "I have written to him yesterday." But in today's official Serbian, the use of “Perfect” is always considered correct, whichever way it is used. According to the modern Serbian language authorities, the Perfect Tense has every meaning imaginable: a state in the present, an action in the past (whether it was witnessed or not), a state in the past, an action before another action in the past, a frequent or repeated action in the past, even a state in the future is considered OK. That is why its use cannot be wrong; whichever way you use it, it is always correct. They consider it as some kind of cure for all illnesses, or a key that opens all doors. According to them, you are only wrong if, instead of the Perfect, you use one of the three undesirable Tenses.

The most problematic issue with the "Perfect" Tense is its name. If we take a look at the imperfective verbs, even in this Tense they are used for continuous actions, which contradicts its name. Naming this Tense "Perfect" for imperfective verbs is ridiculous, and has as much sense as asserting that a man is a woman. For the perfective verbs in Serbian, there is another problem: most Serbs treat it as the Present Perfect. Calling it “Past Tense” is also problematic, because it describes Past only with imperfective verbs. In 2018 I performed a research on whether native Serbian speakers associate the next sentence with the Present or the Past.

This simple sample sentence is in the “Perfect” Tense (called “The Past Tense” in serbian school system), and contains a perfective verb:

77.17% of the respondents (71 of 92) associated this sentence with the Present (they assume the Child is tired right now), and not with the Past (the way our school system teaches us). The sentence was associated with the Present by 100% of the respondents with a low education (10/10), 89.29% of the people with a Secondary School education (25/28) and 66.67% of the people with high education (36/54). Speakers of three fairly dissimilar dialects (dialects of the southern Montenegro, the south-eastern Serbia and the Sumadia region, just south of Belgrade) almost exclusively associate this sentence with the Present (100% = 11/11, 100% = 8/8, 94.44% = 17/18). This percentage falls to 41.18% (7/17) among the high-educated people born in Belgrade (the capital of Serbia), but rises again to 80.95% (17/21) among the high-educated people who have moved to live in Belgrade from other places.

I shall give one more example, which is in the so-called Perfect/The Past Tense: "Петар је дошао у Њу Јорк" ("Peter has come to New York"). Even after 74 years of brainwashing in our school system, among the Serbs it is overwhelmingly understood as "Peter is right now in New York", (not “Peter was in New York”, as our language and state authorities insist it means). It should be noticed that such present-perfect meanings are not limited to those two verbs – almost all (if not all) perfective verbs have such meanings in the Serbian language with the so-called Perfect ("The Past") Tense.

As we can see, the default meaning of this Tense for perfective verbs is Present (more precisely, a state in the Present, as the result of an unspecified past action), just like many pre-communist-era grammarians pointed out. If we want to change the meaning to the Past, we need some Time determiners, like 'yesterday', "months ago", "last year". Thus the sentence becomes:

The time adverb 'yesterday' overrides the meaning of the grammatical Tense, and the new sentence now becomes associated with the Past by all respondents. As we can see, in Serbian we need a Past Time adverb added to a sentence with a perfective verb in the so-called Perfect Tense, for it to be understood as a state in the past. But the same also applies to the Present Tense, which can have present-tense meanings with imperfective verbs only. If we add a Past Time adverb to a sentence in the Present Tense with imperfective verb, its default meaning is overridden, and people start to associate it with the Past, more precisely with actions in the Past. Let see the next example:

"Јуче идем улицом и видим два човека како се свађају и вичу један на другога."

"Yesterday I am going down the street and I see two men arguing and yelling at each other."

This literal translation in English is incorrect, but in Serbian it is normal, it is even ubiquitous in the colloquial speech story-telling, especially in Belgrade (but not in mass media or in formal use, which is an exclusive domain of the so-called Perfect Tense). It seems that Present Tense is the Great Winner, as it fills the gaps left by the forced removal of Aorist, Imperfect and Pluperfect, although the Perfect was intended to replace them in the first place.

The use of Present Tenses with time adverbs to denote the Past is norm in some languages, like Chinese, which has no grammatical Tenses at all. And as a result of the policy of deaoristization, the Serbian language is moving rapidly in the same direction, and is firmly on the road to lose grammatical Tenses, and to convey the meaning solely by Time adverbs, like the Chinese language.

In the next sentence, taken from a Yugoslav WW2 movie "Sutjeska", the Perfect Tense is used for a state in the Future.

"Када будете стигли на железничку станицу, прво проверите је ли воз стигао."

"When you will have arrived to the rail station, first check if the train has arrived."

In vernacular, Low Form Serbian language, Present-Perfect in narratives is a secondary tense, especially with perfective verbs. Overuse (especially exclusive use) of Present-Perfect in such contexts in normal spoken language would sound odd and unnatural, even in northern and biggest cities Belgrade and Novi Sad, where influence of High Form of the language is the greatest. Nevertheless, in High Form of the language even in narratives Present-Perfect usage is very close to 100%, if not 100%.

05. Aorist, Present-Perfect, Preterite: when to use each of them in normal spoken language?

In this section I try to shed more light in what situations different past tenses are best suited in normal spoken language. First way is to divide usage into narrative and non-narrative, where the first puts emphasis on past actions (which prefer simple tenses Aorist, Imperfect, Preterite and Historical Present), and second tends to put focus on the result of action, and so it prefers composite Present-Perfect Tense. Another way is to divide past actions into witnessed and non-witnessed. And finally, we divide usage by type of verbs: perfective and imperfective.

Next table gives preferred tenses for all three kinds of division combined, in Low Form of Language.

Previous table with normal spoken language might look pretty complicated? Well, in High Form of the Language things are much more simpler. First, it eliminates distinction between witnessed and non-witnessed past, together with all tenses for witnessed actions (Aorist, Imperfect, witnessed form of Past Perfect Tense). It also eliminates Preterite. And greatly reduces usage of surviving tenses, except Present-Perfect (The Past Tense). It also eliminates distinction between narrative and non-narrative for perfective verbs.

In Yugoslav, and later Serbian movies and TV Series, the Aorist is typically not used much, but when it is, the characters who use it are mostly peasants, illiterate, poorly educated or stupid people, or are problematic in other ways, even being savage killers. That way the movies convey a message that the use of Aorist is not worthy of an educated and decent person, and is associated with backwardness, stupidity and illiteracy. In a 2017 TV Series about the Serbian medieval Nemanjic Dynasty, the characters speak the standard High Form (“Tarzan-style”) Serbian, not the dialect they really used in the medieval times.

Few statistics from movies (be aware that the Unnamed Past Tense of perfective verbs (Preterite) is not used in these statistics):

When comes it to educated and other high-status characters in movies and TV Series, if they use the Aorist at all, it is almost exclusively in the context of recent actions, i.e. those that happened "immediately before the moment of speech". Peasants, illiterate or poorly educated people, snobs, and other low status characters might use it for non-recent contexts as well.

The aorist is sometimes used in TV, movies and translations from foreign languages to mock peasants and their way of speech. For example, in the Serbian-dubbed cartoon Television Series "SpongeBob SquarePants", the Aorist was used in only one episode, and was spoken, in a mocking way, by several guest peasant characters.

All images, charts, and other graphic resources on this page are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

О значењу прошлих времена у српском jезику, и о политици сузбиjања употребе аориста (in serbian):

Сљедећи рад је о диглосији у Врању на примјеру употребе глаголских времена за описивање прошлости - поређење народнога говора с језиком Врањских новина:

2If a defendant or a witness in Serbian Courts uses Aorist Tense, Imperfect or any of two forms of Historical Present in his Statement (which is not uncommon for peasants or people with low education), their statements will be written down in court records with all of them removed, and replaced with mandatory "The Past Tense".

3Traditionally, Serbian grammar books have stated that the language possesses four past tenses. In fact, one of them, the Past Perfect Tense, has two different forms, which in many dialects have slightly different meanings, so it can be certainly assumed that (Low Form) Serbian in fact has up to five Past Tenses.

4 Even the Serbian Wikipedia states that the terms "Perfect Tense" and "Past Tense" are synonymous (https://sr.wikipedia.org/sr-ec/%D0%9F%D0%B5%D1%80%D1%84%D0%B5%D0%BA%D0%B0%D1%82). It is especially true for contents in English language on the Internet, written by Serbs, for people who want to learn Serbian, where name “The Perfect Tense” is almost always substituted by “The Past Tense”. To prove it, just google “serbian past tense”.

6 Kragujevac is situated virtually in the geographical centre of Serbia, and was it's Capital during part of the first half of 19th century. As we can see from previous picture, journalists of Kragujevac's Newspaper are not so strict with censorship of past tenses usage of local people, especially with peasants.

7 My friend who writes papers for them have confirmed me that their language Editors do not allow use of Aorist or other two undesirable Tenses.

8 This may sound strange to foreigners, not used to communist regimes. But existence of such things was normal in communist states. For example, in communist Yugoslavia, going to church was never prohibited de jure. But it was prohibited de facto, especially in 1940-s and 1950-s. Police and secret services monitored who visits churches, and those who did, could had faced severe punishments and harassments, the most benign to be fired from job, but also to be imprisoned by secret police and labeled as "enemy of state". Even those who celebrated in their own homes religious holidays like Easter or Christmas (or their patron saints, which is common custom of Serbian people called 'Slava') could had faced consequences.

During 1940-s, during and after WW2, Tito's communists in Yugoslavia executed tens of thousands of people (it has been estimated that number of victims reaches 100.000 in Slovenia alone), great majority of them extrajudicially. Summary executions in Serbia were often performed by communists in nazi-style, forcing victims (so called “class enemies”, “enemies of the working class” or “reactionary elements”) to march naked to places of execution. For example, three first cousins of my grandfather were executed by communists.

9 Only the Pluperfect form for the non-witnessed contexts can be found in (very rare) use in the High Form of the Language, and only in cases when it is needed to avoid ambiguity. It's frequency in the High Form is usually much less then 0.5%. In normal colloquial speech it may go up to several percent.

10Russian grammatical influence was ofcource strongest in the System of Past Tenses, where the Russian System has only one Past Tense (which had the same form as Serbian Present-Perfect), and was essentially the subset of Serbian one. But Russian influence was also strong in formation of the Future Tense, and in comparison of adjectives, where russian ways of its formation quickly replaced serbian one. It was also present in declension of noun cases, where for example the vocative noun case (which is very prominent in Serbian language, but nonexistent in Russian) began to be replaced by the nominative case, as was the norm in Russian.

In this page on Wikipedia, we have a sample of the same sentence in both “Slavonic-Serbian” and “Modern-Serbian” (by “modern” there was meant the High Form of the Language). You can see that both use the verb in first person singular in Present-Perfect Tense “sam soobštio” and “sam saopštio” for witnessed action which happened long ago. In normal Low Form Serbian, Aorist Tense (“saopšti(h)”) would be more appropriate, but, as we know, Aorist's use is all but forbidden in High Form of the Language.

12Litterate persons were extremely rare in Serbian autonomy in Ottoman Empire in those times, probably less than 1% of population, and most of those who were able to read and write were priests. Even Knyaz Milosh Obrenovich was illiterate, and he depended on his scribes to be able to run the state.

13All institutions of Serbian Autonomy in Ottoman Empire had Russian names instead of Serbian. For example, their first government was named as "pravitelstvuyustyi Soviet", instead of Serbian "Upravlyayuchi Savet". And first two leaders (Đorđe Petrović and Prince Miloš Obrenović) carried russian titles "Вожд"(="leader") and "Княз" instead of Serbian equivalents ("Вођа" and "Кнез").

14Some of those words imported from Russian language might not be recognised by native Russian speakers, since they are here written using modern Serbian cyrillic.

15Some of them nevertheless survived up to this day, for example “житељ” or “књаз”.

(http://cecils.btk.ppke.hu/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Mandic_Agreement-Morphology-in-Early_REVISED_v7_fin_corr1.pdf) In this work, speech of four serbian children was analysed. Two of them started using Aorist roughly 4 months before The Present-perfect Tense, at the age of 1 year and 6 months. Third child used Aorist about 8 months earlier (at the age of 1y and 8 months), and the fourth child started using both tenses roughly at the same time. And all four children are from Belgrade, which is an area where frequency of Aorist is less than in most other parts of Serbia, due to greater influence of the High form of language in the Capital. Should be noted that this work too exclusively names the Present-perfect Tense as “the Past Tense”.

17A. Belic simply ignored the fact that in Serbian the Aorist is also used with the imperfective verbs, which denote continuous actions, so they can hardly fit into the "immediately before the moment of speech" restriction. I have personally heard many instances of the Aorist with imperfective verbs across Serbia, but I cannot recall any instance of it that matched this restriction.

18King Peter I Karadjordjevic (1844-1921) was King of Serbia (1903-1918) and the first King of Yugoslavia (1918-1921).

19Macedonian language was up to 1945 considered as a dialect of Serbian, and its Aorist and Imperfect Tenses have the same meaning as in the traditional Serbian. In many instances, even their forms are identical.

21Such an example is the book from 1978 "Fires of Komovi Mountains" ("Ватре са Комова") which contains a Chapter with testimonies of 21 peasants from vilage Velika in Montenegro, survivors of Nazi massacre in 1944. Their Testimonies of Nazi atrocities were almost completely cleansed of Aorist. They (all written in the 1st person singular) contain 1043 instances of the (Present-)Perfect Tense, and only 7 Aorists (which make up less than 1%), despite that mountanious village lies in high-aorist-usage area. Because such narratives in Serbian are perfect for use of Aorist if language is not censored, anything less than 20% of it's frequency among past tenses is suspicious. Another book contains testimonies about the same event, but from year 2015 (after the era of communism) where frequency of Aorist Tense is about 30%.

22 The author, Vladimir Chorovic, History Professor of Belgrade University, handed over his book to his Publishers in March 1941. Few weeks later, on April 6th 1941, Nazi Germany invaded Yugoslavia, and in the same month Chorovic was killed by German Army, despite he was just a civilian. If he were not killed by Germans, the Communists would have executed him anyway, just like they executed tens of thousands of people, because he was vocal supporter of Democracy. All of his books were forbidden throughout Communist-era Yugoslavia.

23“The Dialect of Zaplanje”, Jordana Markovic, 2000, a publication by the Serbian Academy of Sciences.

24In late 2021, a group of Aorist Tense usage enthusiasts and me performed a small experiment on Wikipedia in Serbian language. During several months period, we were trying to introduce small amounts of Aorist Tense (up to three per page) in pages about history of several cities and towns in southeastern or southwestern Serbia (including Aorist strongholds like Vranye, Vlasotince, among others). We made 17 such attempts, using different IP addresses. All of them were annuled by Wikipedia's administrators, and all those pages still stay aorist-free. Just as we had anticipated.

25The communist regime tolerated the Aorist and Imperfect Tenses in the fiction literature, because many Croat writers also used them in such contexts, even those in whose dialects A. and I. were nonexistent, like August Senoa, Ivan Mazuranic or Vladimir Nazor. Furthermore, use of the Aorist and Imperfect Tenses in Croatia has been considered as Academic Style. That's why it has been used there not only in Literature, but also in History books and other Academic editions, which is a complete inversion of state of things in Serbia under communist rule. Today (2019), in Croatia is there in the preparation new edition of the Bible, which is the first to be published like ordinary people in Croatia speaks, without Aorist and Imperfect Tenses.

	Serbian Aorist Tense – part of Low Form of Serbian Language	German Preterite Tense (Präteritum)
Tense Type	Inflected (non-compound)	Inflected (non-compound)
Conjugation of sample verb - “to finish”	Ја заврших Ти заврши Он/она/оно заврши Ми завршисмо Ви завршисте Они/оне/она завршише	Ich beendete Du beendetest Er/sie/es beendete Wir beendeten Ihr beendetet Sie beendeten
Tense Meaning	Past events, taken as completed, which does not need to have any present consequences. In colloquial speech is usually used for witnessed actions, but in Literature or History books (up to 1941) is regularly used for nonwitnessed actions too.	Past events, which does not need to have any present consequences.
Territorial distribution in dialects and colloquial speech	Used in all serbian dialects in former Yugoslavia, but it's use grows in the southern/ southeastern direction. Before 1945, in many of them it was the main past Tense.	Full use only in northern Germany. In Switzerland has completely disappeared. In other parts of southern Germany and in Austria, it's use in speech is limited to few verbs like “sein”, “haben”...
State and school system attitude towards it's use	Since the establishment of communist rule in 1945, extremely negative. It's use has been stigmatized. Not welcome in any kind of media or public life. Children in school system are discouraged of it's use. Today, many language editors are even trying to eradicate Aorist from new literary works.	It's use in newspapers, History, and in literary/academic works is encouraged, even in Switzerland and Austria.
State support to it's preservation	No. Since 1945, the State and language authorities has even tried to restrict the meaning of Aorist and limit it only to actions that happened "immediately before the moment of speech". Consequently, Aorist is much more used in spoken language than in written forms, and by older, rural, low educated, unemployed and religious people. Simply said, low status and conservative people.	Yes. There was no attempt by the State to change Preterite's meaning and restrict domain of it's use. Consequently, outside of northern Germany, Preterite is today more used in written forms, and by people with higher education.