Talk:Subject–object–verb word order

German is not SOV
In German there is a rule that the Verb always comes second. The example here: "Er hat	einen Apfel gegessen" 1) is cherry picked. This word order comes only in Perfekt und Plusquamperfekt (Present Perfect, Past Perfect) 2) Ironically shows that there is a verb: "Er HAT" in the second place. Here is a proper SVO example: "Er isst einen Apfel." (He eats an apple) If German is to remain in this list, it should at least be put in a different category. Something like "Partly SOV" would suffice. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Yoreei (talk • contribs) 19:12, 17 January 2017 (UTC)


 * That example is V2 rule, which means that the finite verb has to be placed in the second position of a main clause. If the predicate consists of just one verb, there can no longer be any verb at the end, but if there are two or more verb forms, the infinite one(s) will be placed at the end unless they take the first Position for emphasis. In SVO languages, the infinite Verb will be placed before the object as well.
 * Er kann einen Apfel essen.
 * He can eat an Apple. 2A0A:A541:EAED:0:905D:CEC0:806:9A86 (talk) 16:36, 3 July 2023 (UTC)

Albanian is not SOV
It's standard word order is SVO, but it allows free word order as well, because of its inflections. Just like Modern Greek. By that notion, Modern Greek should be on the list as well. And pretty much any language that has a flexible word order. Ironically, Ancient Greek is not in the list. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.98.112.239 (talk) 20:30, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

Hebrew is NOT VSO
I am a Hebrew speaker and as far as I know, the sentence structure in Hebrew is SVO, like in English. However, in biblical Hebrew, the structure is often, if not steadily, VSO. In this case, I suggest fixing the headline of "Hebrew" being a VSO to "Biblical Hebrew" or "Original Hebrew", etc. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 46.116.169.213 (talk) 21:29, 25 May 2012 (UTC)

Most Common?
All the pages on basic word order I visited today state that SOV is the most common order. None of them cite a source for that. The Crystal (1997) citation, as someone has mentioned on another talk page, doesn't make this claim; it says only that "over 75% of the world's languages use SVO or SOV". I've added a "citation needed" tag. The statement should be modified to fit the Crystal citation if a new citation isn't added. 74.14.180.111 (talk) 15:45, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

---is there VSO language? yes i just found it sorry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verb_Subject_Object

I am somewhat confused with regard to the terminology of SOV, in that it appears to me (a non-native English) as mixing two grammar analytical levels.

In the sentence: "John eats oranges.", 'John' is the subject, 'oranges' is the object but, to keep on the same syntactical analysis level, shouldn't 'eats' be identified as a predicate? Otherwise, one should say that 'John' is a proper noun, 'eats' is a verb, and 'oranges' is a noun again.

I obviously must be in wrong with this - my grammar is rather old and rusty, so I really appreciate your help. Zeta Sagittarii (talk) 17:57, 4 July 2008 (UTC)


 * A predicate is actually a verb phrase that describes the subject, so the predicate in that case is "eats oranges". &mdash; Gwalla | Talk 22:00, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

subject and verbs
During the long but trip from Baltimore to Florida, many passengers slept.

now which is the subject and which is the verb. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.75.41.186 (talk) 17:31, 2 June 2009 (UTC)


 * "During the long bus trip from Baltimore to Florida," adverbial clause "many passengers" subject "slept." verb 86.177.59.90 (talk) 17:33, 21 December 2009 (UTC)

Arabic language can have SOV(look to qoran)typology,for example: al qittu nawatan qata'=the cat(-nominative suffix) a nut(-accusative suffix)cuttedالقطُ نواةً قطعَ.
Arabic language can have SOV(look to qoran)typology,for example:al qittu nawatan qata'=the cat(-nominative suffix) a nut(-accusative suffix)cuttedالقطُ نواةً قطعَ. Humanbyrace (talk) 11:28, 4 December 2009 (UTC)

Punctuation
Shouldn't this be punctuated? Either "Subject, Object, Verb", as in older texts, or "Subject–Object–Verb", as here. — kwami (talk) 00:51, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

Portuguese as SOV language
Portuguese language is SOV when the Object is a pronoun.

Examples:

Sentence:   Eu te amo. Gloss:      I you love. Translation: I love you.

Sentence:   Isso nos engrandece. Gloss:      It make+bigger us. Translation: It make us bigger.

Sentence:   Eles o mataram. Gloss:      They him killed. Translation: They killed him.

Sentence:   Ai, se eu te pego. Gloss:      Ai, if I you catch. Tranlation: Ai, if I catch you. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 187.55.68.75 (talk) 19:30, 13 July 2012 (UTC)

Tamil is SOV and not OVS
I am a Tamil speaker and I believe the table under the Incidence section for Tamil is not correct. In Tamil "I love You" is said as follows:

"Nann Unai Kathalikindren" -- Here "Nann" means "I", "Unai" means "You" and "Kathal" means "Love". This reads as "I You Love", which would be SOV. However, the table under the Incidence section states, " OVS	"You love I." "

This I believe is incorrect. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.243.146.208 (talk) 04:21, 25 August 2012 (UTC)

Tamil is definitely a SOV language.[] But it can be flexible and have OVS, uncommon though it is - such as, using your example, உன்னை நான் காதலிக்கிறேன் (unnai naan kaaathalikiren) or simply உன்னை காதலிக்கிறேன் (unnai kaathalikiren). The verb in latter cases is indicative of the pronoun. --தமிழ் வாழ்க; யாதும் ஊரே, யாவரும் கேளிர் 20:43, 2 March 2013 (UTC)

The table on the left with the 6 row for each possible order
I cannot find the source of the table on the left with the 6 rows for each of the possible order. Can somebody explain me how to view is source and modify it?

Also, I would like to add more example for row that don't have three, do you agree with that? Guillcote (talk) 05:46, 6 March 2013 (UTC)

Free Word Order
I suggest adding a topic on "free word order" which includes languages such as Hungarian, where the conjugation of a noun specifies that it is the object of the sentence. One additional significance in Hungarian as a free word order language is that order of the words specifies emphasis, where other languages may demonstrate this via tonal changes or additional words/phrases for clarification. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:CF:8000:52A9:5192:B0A5:B805:C550 (talk) 13:20, 20 December 2015 (UTC)

Russian is not SOV
Russian allows different word orders, but basically it is SVO. In the example a pronoun его is used, but it is more likely to be preposited to a verb than any noun. If there is a name, like "Она Михаила любит", this sentence sounds natural only with more specific stresses (and meaning like that 'she loves Михаила and not Петра'), much likely to appear only in colloquial speech; a literary construction likely would be "Она любит Михаила". See about it e.g. here. I have seen materials saying that Russian is SOV somewhere on Wikibooks, but don't know who or where have taken this. Ignatus (talk) 19:29, 2 May 2018 (UTC)

+1 - Russian is NOT an SOV language - SOV happens under very particular, very limited circumstances - the example about Raskolnikov is downright ridiculous, because it uses a portion of a sentence - the only way that sentence would have the right to exist, is if it would have had a further explanation, i.e "Raskolnikov the old lady killed, and dismembered". Otherwise it's a purely SVO language.

I'm proposing an edit, and will proceed if there are no comments of any particular interest or value, over the next 7 days. TheDarkSavant (talk) 19:02, 1 June 2022 (UTC)

Removed Russian from the SOV language list, as per the explanation above. TheDarkSavant (talk) 04:12, 14 June 2022 (UTC)
 * Agree with this. People often miss the point that when we say a language is SVO or whichever other permutation, we mean in unmarked sentences where subject=agent=topic. – filelakeshoe (t / c) 🐱 08:01, 14 June 2022 (UTC)

Article needs more nuanced discussion and examples
Many people coming to this page, including myself, are very surprised to see their own languages listed as SOV, when they know they are only so in some special circumstances if at all. I can only claim knowledge of Romance languages, German and Mandarin. Romance languages do exhibit SOV when pronouns are used. But I can easily think of common structures in Spanish as OVS, si te gusta forzar el tema (if you pleases forcing the subject [English pun not originally intended]). The claim that German is SOV is rather far fetched: a main clause will always be SVO: dass man Nebensätze anders formuliert, ist Nebensache (that relative clauses differently formulated are, is a different/minor question). Mandarin, on the other hand, while being squarely classified as SVO, actually uses SOV order frequently with the 把(bǎ)-construction； 我把那份工作已經弄完了 (I bă this job already finished).

A quick search on Google Scholar shows that SOV may indeed be far more common than people, including myself expect, but also that the examples given on this page are somewhat misleading. This paywalled journal article gives similar percentages to those cited: SOV "about 48%" and SVO "about 41%". However, it also lists Romance languages as SVO, as with Spanish in the excerpt below and Italian elsewhere.


 * Goldin‐Meadow et al. (2008) asked speakers of three SVO languages (English, Spanish, and Mandarin) and one SOV language (Turkish) to perform two non‐verbal tasks: first, describe events using manual gestures without speech; and second, reconstruct events illustrated in pictures. The investigators found that in both tasks all of the participants were strongly inclined to use the same sequencing strategy – specifically, agent‐patient‐action, which is analogous to the SOV pattern in spoken languages. Taken together, these three sets of results support the view that SOV and SVO word orders – perhaps especially the former – reflect the most cognitively natural ways of linearizing the fundamental elements in a transitive clause.

The same references to Romance languages as "SVO" and Mandarin as potentially SOV is in this open-access article.

It also seems that linguists realise that maybe SOV/SVO is not a very clear categorisation to make. The following is taken from The World Atlas of Language Structure.


 * While the feature shown on this map [SVO/SOV] is perhaps the single most frequently cited typological feature of languages, it is now recognized that it represents a clause type that does not occur especially frequently in spoken language; it is more common that at least one of the two arguments of a transitive clause will be pronominal, and in many languages pronominal subjects are expressed by verbal affixes. It is argued by Dryer (1997) that a more useful typology is one based on two more basic features, whether the language is OV or VO and whether it is SV or VS .

Anyway, hope this gets some attention from an expert.

MiG-25 (talk) 13:43, 13 January 2021 (UTC)


 * I agree. I'm not particularly well-versed in linguistics generally but I think anyone could see that this article isn't built on a strong foundation of evidence in many places. If the viewpoint you describe is mainstream among contemporary linguists (that SOV is too coarse a classifier in many cases) it implies that this article should be reworked substantially. Since the big problem to me seems to be insufficient citations, I added a "more citations needed" banner, as I think the process of rigorously backing up or pruning the claims in this article would naturally move it more in the direction you describe (provided that viewpoint is indeed mainstream). I don't want to do more right this second as my day-to-day life is pulling me away, but since this topic seems to be the subject of much discussion in the academic literature, I feel pretty confident that anyone who wanted to could improve this article just by holding the existing claims to a higher standard of evidence and doing the associated research. I might at least come back a bit later and improve the Japanese subsection as I do have some high-quality sources on hand that discuss word order in that language. Mesocarp (talk) 02:58, 1 August 2021 (UTC)

Move discussion in progress
There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:VO language which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RMCD bot 03:34, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

Spanish SOV
(No pun intended). I'm unsure about whether the section on Spanish should be reformed or entirely deleted. Currently, it focuses on Spanish sentences with only a pronoun as object, which represent just one of many sentence types in Spanish, and clearly not an unmarked one. All basic constituent orders are possible and even natural in Spanish, in the right context. If the section about Spanish is kept, the next logical step should be to write equivalent sections in all the other word order pages (OSV, OVS, etc.), which would probably be confusing, rather than informative, for readers. Jotamar (talk) 00:42, 28 December 2023 (UTC)