Word Order 101

Mike's Notes

Something I need to learn for UI i18n translations.

Resources

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_order
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject%E2%80%93verb%E2%80%93object_word_order

References

• Reference

Repository

• Home > Ajabbi Research > Library >
• Home > Handbook > 

Last Updated

19/10/2025

Word Order 101

By: Mike Peters

On a Sandy Beach: 19/10/2025

Mike is the inventor and architect of Pipi and the founder of Ajabbi.

My notes from Wikipedia

"In linguistics, word order (also known as linear order) is the order of the syntactic constituents of a language. Word-order typology studies it from a cross-linguistic perspective and examines how languages employ different word-order patterns. Correlations between orders found in different syntactic sub-domains are also of interest. The primary word orders that are of interest are

• The constituent order of a clause, namely the relative order of subject, object, and verb.
• The order of modifiers (adjectives, numerals, demonstratives, possessives, and adjuncts) in a noun phrase;
• The order of adverbials.

...

These are all possible word orders for the subject, object, and verb in the order of most common to rarest (the examples use "she" as the subject, "loves" as the verb, and "him" as the object):

Word Order Name

• Code
• % of languages
• Example languages
• Example of usage

Subject-Object-Verb

• SOV
• 45%
• Ainu, Amharic, Ancient Greek, Akkadian, Armenian, Aymara, Bambara, Basque, Bengali, Burmese, Burushaski, Chukchi, Cushitic languages, Dravidian languages, Elamite, Hindustani, Hittite, Hopi, Itelmen, Japanese, Korean, Kurdish, Latin, Lhasa Tibetan, Manchu, Mongolian, Munda languages, Navajo, Nepali, Nivkh, Northeast Caucasian languages, Northwest Caucasian languages, Pali, Pashto, Persian, Quechua, Sanskrit, Sinhala, Tigrinya, Turkic languages, Yukaghir
• She him loves

Subject-Verb-Object

• SVO
• 42%
• Arabic (modern spoken varieties), Chinese, most European languages, Hausa, Hebrew, Indonesian, Pa'O, Kashmiri, Malay, Swahili, Thai, Vietnamese
• She loves him

Verb-Subject-Object

• VSO
• 9%
• Arabic (classical and modern standard), Berber languages, Biblical Hebrew, Celtic languages, Filipino, Geʽez, Kariri, Polynesian languages
• Loves she him

Verb-Object-Subject

• VOS
• 3%
• Algonquian languages, Arawakan languages, Car, Chumash, Fijian, Malagasy, Mayan languages, Otomanguean languages, Qʼeqchiʼ, Salishan languages, Terêna
• Loves him she

Objects-Verb-Subject

• OVS
• 1%
• Äiwoo, Hixkaryana, Urarina
• Him loves she

Object-Subject-Verb

• OSV
• 0%
• Xavante. Tobati, Warao, Haida
• Him she loves

" - Wikipedia