Subject–object–verb

Incidence

Among natural languages with a word order preference, SOV is the most common type (followed by subject–verb–object; the two types account for more than 75% of natural languages with a preferred order).

Languages that have SOV structure include Ainu, Akkadian, Amharic, Armenian, Assamese, Aymara, Azerbaijani, Basque, Bengali, Burmese, Burushaski, Dakota, Dogon languages, Elamite, Ancient Greek, Hajong, Hindi, Hittite, Hopi, Ijoid languages, Itelmen, Japanese, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Korean, Kurdish, Classical Latin, Lakota, Manchu, Mande languages, Marathi, Mongolian, Navajo, Nepali, Newari, Nivkh, Nobiin, Pāli, Pashto, Persian, Punjabi, Quechua, Senufo languages, Seri, Sicilian, Sindhi, Sinhalese and most other Indo-Iranian languages, Somali and virtually all other Cushitic languages, Sumerian, Tibetan and nearly all other Tibeto-Burman languages, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu and all other Dravidian languages, Tigrinya, Turkic languages, Turkish, Urdu, almost all Uto-Aztecan languages, Uzbek, Welsh, Yukaghir, and virtually all Caucasian languages.

Standard Mandarin is SVO, but for simple sentences with a clear context, word order is flexible enough to allow for SOV or OSV. German and Dutch are considered SVO in conventional typology and SOV in generative grammar. For example, in German, a basic sentence such as "Ich sage etwas über Karl" ("I say something about Karl") is in SVO word order. When a noun clause marker like "dass" or "wer" (in English, "that" or "who" respectively) is used, the verb appears at the end of the sentence for the word order SOV. A possible example in SOV word order would be "Ich sage, dass Karl einen Gürtel gekauft hat." (A literal English translation would be "I say that Karl a belt bought has.") This is V2 word order.

A rare example of SOV word order in English is "I (subject) thee (object) wed (verb)" in the wedding vow "With this ring, I thee wed."

Properties

SOV languages have a strong tendency to use postpositions rather than prepositions, to place auxiliary verbs after the action verb, to place genitive noun phrases before the possessed noun, to place a name before a title or honorific ("James Uncle" and "Johnson Doctor" rather than "Uncle James" and "Doctor Johnson") and to have subordinators appear at the end of subordinate clauses. They have a weaker but significant tendency to place demonstrative adjectives before the nouns they modify. Relative clauses preceding the nouns to which they refer usually signals SOV word order, but the reverse does not hold: SOV languages feature prenominal and postnominal relative clauses roughly equally. SOV languages also seem to exhibit a tendency towards using a time–manner–place ordering of adpositional phrases.

In linguistic typology one can usefully distinguish two types of SOV languages in terms of their type of marking:

1. dependent-marking has case markers to distinguish the subject and the object, which allows it to use the variant OSV word order without ambiguity. This type usually places adjectives and numerals before the nouns they modify and is exclusively suffixing without prefixes. SOV languages of this first type include Japanese and Tamil.
2. head-marking distinguishes subject and object by affixes on the verb rather than markers on the nouns. It also differs from the dependent-marking SOV language in using prefixes as well as suffixes, usually for tense and possession. Because adjectives in this type are much more verb-like than in dependent-marking SOV languages, they usually follow the nouns. In most SOV languages with a significant level of head-marking or verb-like adjectives, numerals and related quantifiers (like "all", "every") also follow the nouns they modify. Languages of this type include Navajo and Seri.

In practice, of course, the distinction between these two types is far from sharp. Many SOV languages are substantially double-marking and tend to exhibit properties intermediate between the two idealised types above.

Basque

Basque does not have subjects but has an agent–object–verb order in transitive clauses:

Burmese

Burmese is an analytic language.

Chinese

Generally, Chinese varieties all feature SVO word order. However, especially in Standard Mandarin, SOV is tolerated as well. There is even a special structure to form an SOV sentence.

Note that SOV is generally used to emphasize the object, such as in this case, where the apple is a very specific apple.

Dutch

Dutch is SOV combined with V2 word order. The non-finite verb (infinitive or participle) remains in final position, but the finite (i.e. inflected) verb is moved to the second position. Simple verbs look like SVO, non-finite verbs (participles, infinitives) and compound verbs follow this pattern:

Pure SOV order is found in subordinate clauses:

French

The French language usually uses a subject–verb–object structure, but when using most pronouns, it places enclitics before the verb. That is sometimes mistaken for SOV word order.

German

German is SOV combined with V2 word order. The non-finite verb (infinitive or participle) remains in final position, but the finite (i.e. inflected) verb is moved to the second position. Simple verbs look like SVO, compound verbs follow this pattern:

The word order changes also depending on whether the phrase is a main clause or a dependent clause. In dependent clauses, the word order is always entirely SOV (cf. also Inversion):

Hajong

'râ' is a particle that indicates the accusative case and 'sae' indicates past tense declarative. Here, 'â' is pronounced as the 'i' in 'girl' and 'ae' is pronounced as the 'ay' in 'say'.

Hungarian

Hungarian word order is free, although the meaning slightly changes. Almost all permutations of the following sample are valid, but with stress on different parts of the meaning.

Italian

The Italian language usually uses a subject–verb–object structure, but when an enclitic pronoun is used, this comes before the verb and the auxiliary.

Japanese

The markers が (ga) and を (o) are, respectively, subject and object markers for the words that precede them. Technically, the sentence could be translated a number of ways ("I open a box", "It is I who open the boxes", etc.), but this does not affect the SOV analysis.

Japanese has some flexibility in word order, so an OSV is also possible. (箱を私が開けます。)

Kashmiri

Like German and Dutch the Indo-Aryan language Kashmiri is SOV combined with V2 word order. The non-finite verb (infinitive or participle) remains in final position, but the finite (i.e. inflected) part of the verb appears in second position. Simple verbs look like SVO, whereas auxiliated verbs are discontinuous and adhere to this pattern:

Since Kashmiri is a V2 language if the word tsũũţh 'apple' comes first then the subject kuur 'girl' must follow the auxiliary chhi 'is': tsũũţh chhi kuur khyevaan [Lit. "Apples is girl eating."]

The word order changes also depending on whether the phrase is in a main clause or in certain kinds of dependent clause. For instance, in relative clauses, the word order is SOVAux:

Korean

'가 (ga)/이 (i)' is a particle that indicates the nominative case. '를 (reul)/을 (eul)' is a particle that indicates the accusative case. '-ㄴ다 (nda)' indicates present tense declarative. The consonant 'ㄹ (l)' in the verb stem (열-) is dropped before the suffix.

※ Here, '나 (na, I (pronoun))' is changed to '내 (nae)' before '가 (ga)'.

Latin

Classical Latin was an inflected language and had a very flexible word order and sentence structure, but the most usual word order was SOV.

Again, there are multiple valid translations (such as "a slave") that do not affect the overall analysis.

Portuguese

Portuguese is an SVO language, but it has some SOV constructs, though they tend to sound excessively formal or bookish in Brazil (as do other constructs that are more prominent in Portugal), never being used colloquially in said country – it can even be said that it is foreign to Vernacular Brazilian Portuguese, in the case of the theory that Brazil's spoken and informal written registers present a diglossia.

When using a temporal adverb, optionally with the negative:

Nós já [não] os temos. Literally: We already [not] them have. Meaning: (Positive) We already have them. (Negative) We do not have them anymore.

Nós ainda [não] os temos. Literally: We still [not] them have. Meaning: (Positive) We still have them. (Negative) We have do not them yet..

When answering the phone: Sim, sou eu. Literally: Yes, am I. Meaning: Yes, it's I

SVO form: Sou eu mesmo/mesma, literally "It's me [indeed]".

There is an infix construction for the future and conditional tenses:

Eu fá-lo-ei amanhã. Literally: I do-it-will tomorrow. Meaning: I will do it tomorrow.

SVO form: Eu hei-de fazê-lo amanhã or eu farei o mesmo amanhã

On composed sentences, it is also allowed the SOV order for the last part in some situations like:

Ela não os comeu, mas comi-os eu. Literally: She did not eat them, but ate them I. Meaning: She did not eat them, but I did.

SVO form: Ela não comeu os mesmos, mas eu comi [a eles].

Russian

Russian is an inflected language and very flexible in word order; it allows all possible word combinations. But may generally be considered an SVO language.

for example: Она любит его, любит его oна, любит oна его, and virtually all re-orderings of Russian sentence order are correct although this is often used in different situations to emphasize particular constituents of a sentence. Who loves him? 'she' is the one who loves him (emphatic meaning). In this way any part of the sentence can be emphasized without changing basic meaning (a convenience created by Russian's noun case system)

Somali

Somali generally uses the subject–object–verb structure when speaking formally.

Spanish

The Spanish language usually uses a subject–verb–object structure, but when an enclitic pronoun is used, this comes before the verb and the auxiliary. Sometimes, in dual-verb constructions involving the infinitive and the gerund, the enclitic pronoun can be put before both verbs, or attached to the end of the second verb.

Tamil

The தான் (tān) and யை (yai) are, respectively, nominative and accusative markers for the subject and object that respectively precede them. The தான் (tān) is optional in the Tamil language. The sentence may literally be translated as 'I [who am] the box [which] open shall.'

The sentence may also be translated, although less frequently, as பெட்டியை நான் தான் திறப்பேன் (Peṭṭiyai nāṉ tāṉ tiṟappēn), or simply, பெட்டியை திறப்பேன் (Peṭṭiyai tiṟappēn) as Tamil is a null-subject language because the indicative verb at the end of the word indicates the 1st person subject. This follows the object-subject-verb (OSV) pattern.

Turkish

Like all other Turkic languages, Turkish has flexibility in word order, so any order is possible. For example, in addition to the SOV order above, this sentence could also be constructed as OSV (Elmayı Yusuf yedi.), OVS (Elmayı yedi Yusuf.), VSO (Yedi Yusuf elmayı.), VOS (Yedi elmayı Yusuf.), or SVO (Yusuf yedi elmayı.), but these other orders carry a connotation of emphasis of importance on either the subject, object, or the verb. The SOV order is the "default" one that does not connote particular emphasis on any part of the sentence.

Uzbek

The marker "ga" is a dative case marker for the object that precedes it. Due to flexibility in word order in Uzbek, it is possible to transform the sentence into OSV as well ("Xivaga Anvar ketdi" / "It was Anvar who went to Khiva").