In linguistics

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

 and grammar, the interrogative mood (abbreviated ) is an epistemic

Epistemic modality

Epistemic modality is a sub-type of linguistic modality that deals with a speaker's evaluation/judgment of, degree of confidence in, or belief of the knowledge upon which a proposition is based. In other words, epistemic modality refers to the way speakers communicate their doubts, certainties, and...

 grammatical mood

Grammatical mood

In linguistics, grammatical mood is a grammatical feature of verbs, used to signal modality. That is, it is the use of verbal inflections that allow speakers to express their attitude toward what they are saying...

 used for asking questions by inflecting

Inflection

In grammar, inflection or inflexion is the modification of a word to express different grammatical categories such as tense, grammatical mood, grammatical voice, aspect, person, number, gender and case...

 the main verb. Its occurrence is rare.

Examples of languages with an interrogative mood

• Irish Gaelic
• Scottish Gaelic
• Nenets
• Turkish
  Turkish language
  Turkish is a language spoken as a native language by over 83 million people worldwide, making it the most commonly spoken of the Turkic languages. Its speakers are located predominantly in Turkey and Northern Cyprus with smaller groups in Iraq, Greece, Bulgaria, the Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo,...
  
  
• Welsh
  Welsh language
  Welsh is a member of the Brythonic branch of the Celtic languages spoken natively in Wales, by some along the Welsh border in England, and in Y Wladfa...
  
  
• Venetan (Venetian)
  Venetian language
  Venetian or Venetan is a Romance language spoken as a native language by over two million people, mostly in the Veneto region of Italy, where of five million inhabitants almost all can understand it. It is sometimes spoken and often well understood outside Veneto, in Trentino, Friuli, Venezia...
  
  
• Korean
  Korean language
  Korean is the official language of the country Korea, in both South and North. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in People's Republic of China. There are about 78 million Korean speakers worldwide. In the 15th century, a national writing...
  
  

Alternatives to the interrogative mood

Very few languages have an interrogative mood. For most languages, there is no special question-asking mood. Many languages employ one of the following syntactic

Syntax

In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing phrases and sentences in natural languages....

 methods to change an ordinary sentence (declarative statement) into a question:

• Adding a particle
  Grammatical particle
  In grammar, a particle is a function word that does not belong to any of the inflected grammatical word classes . It is a catch-all term for a heterogeneous set of words and terms that lack a precise lexical definition...
  
   to the beginning or end of a sentence, such as the Japanese
  Japanese language
  is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
  
   particle ka and the Mandarin
  Standard Mandarin
  Standard Chinese or Modern Standard Chinese, also known as Mandarin or Putonghua, is the official language of the People's Republic of China and Republic of China , and is one of the four official languages of Singapore....
  
   particle ma.

  Kare wa Nihon-jin desu; "He is Japanese."

  → Kare wa Nihon-jin desu ka?; "Is he Japanese?"

  "He is Chinese [boy/man]."

  → "Is he Chinese?"

• Adding a generic ending to the end of a word, such as in Latin where -ne is added to the end of the first word of the interrogation:

  Tu es puer. "You are a boy."

  → Tune es puer? "Are you a boy?"

• Changing word order
  Word order
  In linguistics, word order typology refers to the study of the order of the syntactic constituents of a language, and how different languages can employ different orders. Correlations between orders found in different syntactic subdomains are also of interest...
  
  . In some Romance languages
  Romance languages
  The Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family, more precisely of the Italic languages subfamily, comprising all the languages that descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of ancient Rome...
  
  , such as French
  French language
  French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
  
  , one also asks a question by switching the verb with the subject (SVO → VSO). The switched subject can later result in grammatically interrogative endings generating an interrogative mood as in most varieties of Venetian
  Venetian language
  Venetian or Venetan is a Romance language spoken as a native language by over two million people, mostly in the Veneto region of Italy, where of five million inhabitants almost all can understand it. It is sometimes spoken and often well understood outside Veneto, in Trentino, Friuli, Venezia...
  
   — e.g. Old Venetian vu magnè → magnè-vu? → Modern Venetian magneto/magnèu?, now used also with overt subjects; Voaltri magnèo co mi? (literally "You eat-you with me?").
• English
  English language
  English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
  
   similarly changes word order from SVO to VSO ("You are sure" becomes, "Are you sure?"). Very often, the auxiliary verb
  Auxiliary verb
  In linguistics, an auxiliary verb is a verb that gives further semantic or syntactic information about a main or full verb. In English, the extra meaning provided by an auxiliary verb alters the basic meaning of the main verb to make it have one or more of the following functions: passive voice,...
  
   "do" is inserted, undergoing the change in word order in the place of the main verb ("You have brown hair" becomes, "Do you have brown hair?"). This latter form became quite common in English in the late 16th century.
• Spoken Welsh
  Welsh language
  Welsh is a member of the Brythonic branch of the Celtic languages spoken natively in Wales, by some along the Welsh border in England, and in Y Wladfa...
  
   changes the primary auxiliary verb bod — e.g. Rwyt ti'n bwyta "You are eating" → Wyt ti'n bwyta? "Are you eating?"
• In Turkish, the interrogative preposition "mı" (also "mi", "mu", "mü" according to the last vowel of the word) is added. Other personal or verbal suffixes are also added to the suitable preposition.

  Geliyorum. "I am coming."

  → Geliyor muyum? "Am I coming?"

  Geliyordum. "I was coming."

  → Geliyor muydum? "Was I coming?"

  Geldim. "I came."

  → Geldim mi? "Did I come?"

  Evlisin. "You are married."

  → Evli misin? "Are you married?"

• Offering the listener an explicit yes/no alternative, such as in Mandarin:

  "He is Chinese."

  → "Is he Chinese?"

• Using a different intonation
  Intonation (linguistics)
  In linguistics, intonation is variation of pitch while speaking which is not used to distinguish words. It contrasts with tone, in which pitch variation does distinguish words. Intonation, rhythm, and stress are the three main elements of linguistic prosody...
  
  . English usually ends questions with a rising tone. In some Romance languages, such as Italian
  Italian language
  Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
  
  , some interrogative sentences are distinguished from declarative sentences only through intonation.

Languages that use a special mood of the verb to mark questions may also employ one or more of the preceding methods. For example, a language could always use the interrogative mood to ask a question, but it could also offer the listener a choice if a certain answer is desired.