# Linguistics: Word order in languages **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [January 9, 2020, 4:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linguistics-word-order-in-languages/846178 "2020-01-09T16:52:56Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![EdelweissPirate](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/8491ac/32.png) [@EdelweissPirate](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EdelweissPirate)\ **Post date:** [January 10, 2020, 6:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linguistics-word-order-in-languages/846178/21 "2020-01-10T06:53:10Z")
Here’s [an overview of the complexities of word order in Attic Greek](http://atticgreek.org/downloads/WordOrder.pdf). It’s a textbook excerpt, but it’s pretty approachable. I don’t know German, but I gather from this thread and the linked text that word order is considerably more flexible in Greek than in German. ---
**Author:** ![GreenWyvern](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/greenwyvern/32/2834_2.png) [@GreenWyvern](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GreenWyvern)\ **Post date:** [January 10, 2020, 8:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linguistics-word-order-in-languages/846178/22 "2020-01-10T08:13:15Z")
Old English (Anglo-Saxon) was a highly inflected language with a flexible word order, but it became steadily simpler over the centuries until it turned into modern English. From the wiki on [Old English grammar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English_grammar): > [@](#): > > Nouns, pronouns, adjectives and determiners were fully inflected with five grammatical cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, and instrumental), two grammatical numbers (singular and plural) and three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter). First- and second-person personal pronouns also had dual forms for referring to groups of two people, in addition to the usual singular and plural forms.[1] The instrumental case was somewhat rare and occurred only in the masculine and neuter singular. It was often replaced by the dative. Adjectives, pronouns and (sometimes) participles agreed with their antecedent nouns in case, number and gender. Finite verbs agreed with their subject in person and number. > > Nouns came in numerous declensions (with many parallels in Latin, Ancient Greek and Sanskrit). Verbs came in nine main conjugations (seven strong and two weak), all with numerous subtypes, as well as a few additional smaller conjugations and a handful of irregular verbs. [Word order](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English_grammar#Syntax) was flexible: > [@](#): > > Old English syntax was similar in many ways to that of Modern English. However, there were some important differences. Some were simply consequences of the greater level of nominal and verbal inflection, and word order was generally freer. There are also differences in the default word order and in the construction of negation, questions, relative clauses and subordinate clauses. … > > There was some flexibility in word order of Old English since the heavily inflected nature of nouns, adjectives, and verbs often indicated the relationships between clause arguments. Scrambling of constituents was common. Even sometimes scrambling within a constituent occurred. … ---
**Author:** ![Broomstick](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/broomstick/32/246_2.png) [@Broomstick](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Broomstick)\ **Post date:** [January 10, 2020, 9:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linguistics-word-order-in-languages/846178/23 "2020-01-10T09:02:50Z")
> [@Johanna](#): > > There are 6 possible combinations: OSV, OVS, SOV, SVO, VOS, VSO. Of these, almost all the world’s languages are either SOV, SVO, or OSV. The other three are rare or extremely rare. The most common word order among the world’s languages is SOV. Our familiar SVO comes in second place. That was one of the fun things about studying Irish - it’s VSO. Well, I thought it was fun, for a lot of people it’s part of what makes the Celtic languages hard. As Celtic languages (Irish, Gaelic, Welsh, Manx, etc.) used to be a lot more common VSO word order also used to be more common before being displace by various invasions and conquering by the likes of Julius Ceaser, Angles/Saxons/Jutes, and the Vikings. ---
**Author:** ![Broomstick](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/broomstick/32/246_2.png) [@Broomstick](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Broomstick)\ **Post date:** [January 10, 2020, 9:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linguistics-word-order-in-languages/846178/24 "2020-01-10T09:09:26Z")
> [@eschereal](#): > > ISTR reading somewhere that SOV tends to mark less mature languages and the more mature languages transition through SVO to, eventually, VSO (Gaelic languages tend to be VSO). However, I suspect this assessment may have been coloured with an ethnocentric lens, as the text seemed to be suggesting that SOV languages (of which there are very many, but not in terms of abundance of speakers) were less sophisticated. Uh, yeah - languages are not “less mature” or “more mature”. Nor do I see anything inherently better in one particular word order over another. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [January 10, 2020, 10:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linguistics-word-order-in-languages/846178/25 "2020-01-10T10:35:37Z")
This might be off-topic. English (maybe other languages, I don’t know) has conventions that go deeper than O/S/V - the order of adjectives is also quite important; as quotably noted by author mark Forsyth: > [@](#): > > Tolkien wrote his first story aged seven. It was about a “green great dragon.” He showed it to his mother who told him that you absolutely couldn’t have a green great dragon, and that it had to be a great green one instead. Tolkien was so disheartened that he never wrote another story for years. > The reason for Tolkien’s mistake, since you ask, is that adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac. It’s an odd thing that every English speaker uses that list, but almost none of us could write it out. And as size comes before colour, green great dragons can’t exist. Sometimes authors and poets deliberately break this convention in order to create impact. ---
**Author:** ![Xema](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/x/9de053/32.png) [@Xema](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Xema)\ **Post date:** [January 10, 2020, 11:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linguistics-word-order-in-languages/846178/26 "2020-01-10T11:04:49Z")
> [@RivkahChaya](#): > > There’s a story, probably apocryphal, but still funny, about Mark Twain. Supposedly, he was at a terrible play written by a German (translated, I assume). His companions wanted to leave during the intermission, but Twain said “No! I’m waiting for the verb.” And there’s this: > [@Mark Twain](#): > > Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [January 10, 2020, 12:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linguistics-word-order-in-languages/846178/27 "2020-01-10T12:52:00Z")
Johanna, you say that the frequency of the orderings of S, V, and O is as follows: \> Of these, almost all the world’s languages are either SOV, SVO, or OSV. The other \> three are rare or extremely rare. The most common word order among the world’s \> languages is SOV. Our familiar SVO comes in second place. That doesn’t match sources I’ve checked, which say: \> In percentages, SOV order is found in 47.5% of languages, SVO order — in 41%, \> VSO order in 8%, VOS order in 2.1%, OVS in 0.9% and OSV in 0.3% of languages. > **[On statistical universals - Languages Of The World](https://www.languagesoftheworld.info/linguistic-typology/on-statistical-universals.html)** > > In yesterday’s posting, we’ve come to a conclusion that statistical universals (e.g., “Languages with both adjective-noun and noun-numeral orders are extremely rare”) are useless for a learner trying to navigate the minefield of her target language’s... Other sources have a separate category for languages without a fixed order, so they say: \> SOV 41.0% \> SVO 35.4% \> VSO 6.9% \> VOS 1.8% \> OVS 0.8% \> OSV 0.3% \> UNFIXED 13.7% > **[Word order](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_order)** > > 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 different languages employ different orders. Correlations between orders found in different syntactic sub-domains are also of interest. The primary word orders that are of interest are > Some languages use relatively fixed word order, often relying on the order of constituents to convey grammatical inf... Did you make a copying error in your claim, or do you have a better source than me? Also, we should note that not all languages are correctly described using the distinction between subjects and objects. Some split up the arguments of a verb into ergative and absolutive instead. This means that the six orders for the S, V, and O are not useful in classifying those languages: > **[Ergative–absolutive alignment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergative%E2%80%93absolutive_language)** > > In linguistic typology, ergative–absolutive alignment is a type of morphosyntactic alignment in which the single argument ("subject") of an intransitive verb behaves like the object of a transitive verb, and differently from the agent of a transitive verb. Examples include Basque, Georgian, Mayan, Tibetan, and certain Indo-European languages (such as the Kurdish languages and many Indo-Aryan languages like Hindi–Urdu). It has controversially also been attributed to the Semitic modern Aramaic l Th... ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [January 10, 2020, 3:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linguistics-word-order-in-languages/846178/28 "2020-01-10T15:13:25Z")
> [@Mangetout](#): > > This might be off-topic. English (maybe other languages, I don’t know) has conventions that go deeper than O/S/V - the order of adjectives is also quite important; as quotably noted by author mark Forsyth: > > Sometimes authors and poets deliberately break this convention in order to create impact. But you can have green great dragons! It’s a great dragon (as in, species “great dragon”) which is green. ---
**Author:** ![eschereal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eschereal/32/18939_2.png) [@eschereal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eschereal)\ **Post date:** [January 10, 2020, 6:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linguistics-word-order-in-languages/846178/29 "2020-01-10T18:19:38Z")
> [@Wendell\_Wagner](#): > > Other sources have a separate category for languages without a fixed order … That seems a little unrealistic, though. Even a flexible language like Russian tends to have a preferred ordering. It kind of has to, since going out of order is typically tool for emphasis. It is like saying that Asian languages are specifically tonal while a language like English is not: while technically true, IME, a large amount of information in spoken English is carried in tone (as well as cadence), and often an indistinct utterance can be resolved through its melody (here, the rigidity of order can be immensely helpful). ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2020, 11:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linguistics-word-order-in-languages/846178/30 "2020-01-11T11:30:21Z")
> [@Wendell\_Wagner](#): > > Johanna, you say that the frequency of the orderings of S, V, and O is as follows: > > \> Of these, almost all the world’s languages are either SOV, SVO, or OSV. The other > \> three are rare or extremely rare. The most common word order among the world’s > \> languages is SOV. Our familiar SVO comes in second place. > > That doesn’t match sources I’ve checked, which say: > > \> In percentages, SOV order is found in 47.5% of languages, SVO order — in 41%, > \> VSO order in 8%, VOS order in 2.1%, OVS in 0.9% and OSV in 0.3% of languages. That does match what I said. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2020, 1:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linguistics-word-order-in-languages/846178/31 "2020-01-11T13:51:58Z")
Um, no, you give SOV, SVO, and OSV as being the most common, while it’s actually SOV, SVO, and VSO. ---
**Author:** ![Suburban\_Plankton](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/suburban_plankton/32/219_2.png) [@Suburban\_Plankton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Suburban_Plankton)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2020, 6:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linguistics-word-order-in-languages/846178/32 "2020-01-11T18:51:19Z")
> [@Civil\_Guy](#): > > The [History of English](https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/) podcast discusses this somewhat – it’s not produced by a professional linguist, but it seems to be very well researched. This is a fantastic podcast, especially for answering all of those “how come the English language does this weird thing?” questions. ---
**Author:** ![septimus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/septimus/32/410_2.png) [@septimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/septimus)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2020, 7:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linguistics-word-order-in-languages/846178/33 "2020-01-11T19:01:56Z")
> [@Wendell\_Wagner](#): > > Um, no, you give SOV, SVO, and OSV as being the most common, while it’s actually SOV, SVO, and VSO. What about a language like Arabic? If spoken Arabic is VSO, mightn’t we say written Arabic is OSV? [runs for cover! 😛] ---
**Author:** ![markn\_1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f9ae1b/32.png) [@markn\_1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/markn_1)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2020, 7:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linguistics-word-order-in-languages/846178/34 "2020-01-11T19:30:12Z")
Klingon is OVS, because … alien. There are a number of linguistic in-jokes like that built into the language, where it has some feature that is rare or absent in natural human languages. ---
**Author:** ![PlaceboTarget](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/placebotarget/32/1073_2.png) [@PlaceboTarget](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PlaceboTarget)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2020, 8:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linguistics-word-order-in-languages/846178/35 "2020-01-11T20:27:59Z")
> [@markn\_1](#): > > Klingon is OVS, because … alien. There are a number of linguistic in-jokes like that built into the language, where it has some feature that is rare or absent in natural human languages. I’m not sure how rare it is, but OVS is common in Romanian. Here’s an example: il voi transmite eu. It means, I will transmit it, where eu=I, voi transmite=will transmit, and il=it. OV is even more common than OVS because S is actually included in the verb form, which can make it hard for us (Romanians) to learn certain languages. ---
**Author:** ![Hari\_Seldon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hari_seldon/32/5173_2.png) [@Hari\_Seldon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hari_Seldon)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2020, 8:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linguistics-word-order-in-languages/846178/36 "2020-01-11T20:33:07Z")
Linguists generally consider German to be SOV in its underlying structure. This appears to be contradicted by simple declarative sentences such as “Er hat ein Buch”. But “Er hat ein Buch gekauft” has the auxiliary send but the main verb last. Also “Er will ein Buch kaufen”. And the SOV order is always used in subordinate clauses. English does none of these things. Another interesting point. SVO languages tend to have adjectives follow their nouns. French does this but English doesn’t and linguists consider this somewhat inconsistent. SOV languages have adjectives preposed. I remember a sentence “Der vor dem Hotel sitzende Mann” (the in front of the hotel sitting man). Please forgive if I have mucked up the German; I studied it 60 years ago (including the poor man sitting in front of the hotel). ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2020, 9:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linguistics-word-order-in-languages/846178/37 "2020-01-11T21:29:46Z")
> [@Wendell\_Wagner](#): > > Um, no, you give SOV, SVO, and OSV as being the most common, while it’s actually SOV, SVO, and VSO. Oh, whoops, I did reverse the order of the letters in VSO, sorry. Meant I totally “VSO” and thinking was I of Arabic and Irish. But to process the letters in the right order was hard for my brain somehow. At least with LGBT, GLBT, TBGL, etc. it still means the same thing if you inadvertently scramble the letters. ---
**Author:** ![markn\_1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f9ae1b/32.png) [@markn\_1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/markn_1)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2020, 10:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linguistics-word-order-in-languages/846178/38 "2020-01-11T22:18:35Z")
> [@PlaceboTarget](#): > > I’m not sure how rare it is, but OVS is common in Romanian. Here’s an example: il voi transmite eu. It means, I will transmit it, where eu=I, voi transmite=will transmit, and il=it. OV is even more common than OVS because S is actually included in the verb form, which can make it hard for us (Romanians) to learn certain languages. I don’t know much about Romanian, but Wikipedia says it is classified as a SVO language. In most languages there are exceptions to the standard word order. Even in English there are common (often fossilized) phrases with unusual word order like “I thee wed” (SOV) or “You I like!” (OSV) or “Believe you me” (VSO). ---
**Author:** ![PlaceboTarget](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/placebotarget/32/1073_2.png) [@PlaceboTarget](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PlaceboTarget)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2020, 5:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linguistics-word-order-in-languages/846178/39 "2020-01-12T05:20:07Z")
> [@markn\_1](#): > > I don’t know much about Romanian, but Wikipedia says it is classified as a SVO language. My first reaction was to think Wikipedia may be wrong in this case because “let’s be honest” no one really cares about Romanian. But then I thought the article was based on information from people who study languages for a living, so there must be a mistake I was making. I translated several other short English statements into Romanian and every time I came up with OVS-type structures. “Okay,” I said to myself. “Let me think like a linguist. How would I proceed with this if I wanted to establish whether Romanian was an SVO or OVS language?” Well, a linguist would not start from a statement like “I will transmit it,” but rather “The military will transmit the message,” where both the subject and object are nouns. And I have to admit that the Romanian translation shows an SVO-type structure: “Militarii vor transmite mesajul.” However, as soon as the speaker uses a pronoun for the object instead of a noun, the OVS-type structure becomes the norm. “The military will transmit it” -\> “Il vor transmite militarii.” But because word order is less rigid in Romanian, it is possible to use an SOV-type structure as well. I want to point out that statistically speaking OVS-type statements are by far more numerous than SOV-type statements. These are not exceptions or examples of ossified structures - they’re everyday statements that speakers build or adjust to communicate basic stuff. This is one of the reasons why I think foreigners must find Romanian impossible to study. And yet Arab people seem to learn it amazingly fast. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2020, 7:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linguistics-word-order-in-languages/846178/40 "2020-01-12T07:50:22Z")
Like everything else in existence (particularly in linguistics), neat categorization doesn’t consistently work. Even in the cases where you can more or less say that a particular language is SOV, SVO, VSO, VOS, OVS, or OSV, there will be occasional exceptions. Sometimes the number of exceptions is so large that it’s hard to categorize the language as being consistently one of those six categories at all. Sometimes it will be better just to say that there’s no fixed order at all. Sometimes the distinction between subjects and objects used in those six categories doesn’t really correctly explain the different sorts of arguments (i.e., nouns and pronouns) of verbs in the best way, as in ergative-absolutive languages. The same is true about much of how languages work. If you expect all languages to be explainable in rigid structures, you’re going to be disappointed. Languages don’t work that way. I should know. I spent three years as a graduate student in linguistics after getting a bachelor’s degree in mathematics. At that time (1974-1977), during the height of generative grammar’s delusional control of the field, people thought that it was possible to explain how language worked with a relatively small set of principles. It isn’t. I went back into mathematics after discovering that there was no way to consistently apply any of the theories then battling for control of the field to real languages. Languages are huge messy structures for which no single neat set of rules will work in all cases. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linguistics-word-order-in-languages/846178.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linguistics-word-order-in-languages/846178.md?page=3)