Inchoative aspect is a verbal category, referring to an action soon to take place. It can be found in conservative Indo-European languages such as Latin and Lithuanian, and also in Balto-Fennic languages. In other languages, auxiliary verbs can be used, for example French (as aller plus infinitive: je vais faire "I am going to do"), English (often as "I am going to do" or "I am about to do"). In these cases, the term near future is more commonly used.

Since inchoative is an aspect and not a tense, it can be combined with tenses to form present inchoative, past inchoative and future inchoative, all used in Lithuanian. Finnish employs a systematic construction ole-TEMP-PERS X-maisilla-POSS "to be on (my/your/etc.) X-ings", where the temporal and personal ending and possessive suffix are to be selected according to the context. For example, "ol+i+t kaatu+maisilla+si", literally "you were on your fallings down", meaning "you were about to fall down". The -maisilla- is a string of derivational suffixes: ma participle; i plural; s adjective suffix; lla adessive case.

Aspect inchoatif