Subject–verb–object word order
In linguistic typology, subject–verb–object (SVO) is a sentence structure where the subject comes first, the verb second, and the object third. Languages may be classified according to the dominant sequence of these elements in unmarked sentences (i.e., sentences in which an unusual word order is not used for emphasis). English is included in this group. An example is "Sam ate yogurt."
| 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 () | ||||
| Linguistic typology |
|---|
| Morphological |
| Morphosyntactic |
| Word order |
| Lexicon |
SVO is the second-most common order by number of known languages, after SOV. Together, SVO and SOV account for more than 87% of the world's languages. The label SVO often includes ergative languages although they do not have nominative subjects.
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