Object–subject–verb word order
In linguistic typology, object–subject–verb (OSV) or object–agent–verb (OAV) is a classification of languages, based on whether the structure predominates in pragmatically neutral expressions. An example of this would be "Oranges Sam ate."
| Linguistic typology |
|---|
| Morphological |
| Morphosyntactic |
| Word order |
| Lexicon |
| Word order | English equivalent | Proportion of languages | Example languages | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SOV | "Cows grass eat." | 45% | Ancient Greek, Bengali, Burmese, Hindi/Urdu, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Oromo, Persian, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, Turkish, etc | |
| SVO | "Cows eat grass." | 42% | Chinese, English, French, Hausa, Hebrew, Arabic, Italian, Malay, Portuguese, Spanish, Swahili, Thai, Vietnamese, etc | |
| VSO | "Eat cows grass." | 9% | Biblical Hebrew, Classical Arabic, Filipino, Geʽez, Irish, Māori, Tuareg-Berber, Welsh | |
| VOS | "Eat grass cows." | 3% | Car, Fijian, Malagasy, Qʼeqchiʼ, Terêna | |
| OVS | "Grass eat cows." | 1% | Hixkaryana, Urarina | |
| OSV | "Grass cows eat." | 0% | Tobati, Warao | |
| Frequency distribution of word order in languages surveyed by Russell S. Tomlin in the 1980s () | ||||
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