What is the subjunctive and why does French use it more than English?

A common mistake about the subjunctive is that it is a tense; this is not correct, rather the subjunctive is a mood, the mood of possibility. It is used to imply what may or may not occur. As such, the speaker will use the subjunctive when expressing a wish or desire, a like or dislike, or the probability of something occurring. It is also worth noting that the subjunctive is used when a command is given, the imperative, since it is not always certain that the command will be followed. This is the same across the majority of Latin-based languages, i.e. French, Spanish and English. However, how this manifests on the verb depends on the language itself. French is a morphologically rich language, meaning that its verbs change form greatly depending on the tense or subject they relate to. In other words, the conjugations are much more complex. As such, the subjunctive conjugations vary greatly from their indicative counterparts[1]. This is not the case in English; English is known to be morphologically simple, meaning that there is no great variety between conjugations regardless of tense or subject. It is for this reason that in French the subjunctive seems more common, it is more visible due to its contrast with the indicative. It is not that English doesn’t use the subjunctive as much as French; it is simply that it doesn’t differ as much from the indicative (if at all) and therefore appears less common. Indeed the only real clear example of the subjunctive in English is the phrase “if I were”. Apart from that, the subjunctive is indistinguishable from the indicative in English. [1] The indicative is the opposite of the subjunctive, i.e. is used when something is certain.