ABSTRACT:This paper presents an analysis of tense and aspect variation in the news discourse of Nepali English. It takes the position that institutionalized non‐native varieties of English employ local norms of usage which are available for linguistic analysis. Nepali English news‐stories employ the pluperfect in some cases where NaE would use simple past. This pluperfect is used for backgrounding, interacting with other forms to provide textual coherence. It is bound to the news text's relevance structure, and signals information which is low in importance to the major topic of the article. The Nepali English pluperfect reflects a primary remoteness semantic while the native English pluperfect reflects a primary anteriority seman