Shall and will
Shall and
will are two of the English modal verbs. They have various uses, including the expression of propositions about the future, in what is usually referred to as the future tense of English. In British English, there has been a traditional rule of prescriptive grammar stating that, when expressing pure futurity,
shall is to be used when the subject is in the first person, and
will in other cases. In practice this rule is commonly not adhered to by any group of English speakers, and many speakers do not differentiate between
will and
shall when expressing futurity, with the use of
will being much more common and less formal than
shall. In many specific contexts, however, a distinction still continues.