In linguistic typology, a subject–object–verb (SOV) language is one in which the subject, object, and verb of a sentence always or usually appear in that order. If English were SOV, "Sam apples ate" would be an ordinary sentence, as opposed to the actual Standard English "Sam ate apples" which is subject–verb–object (SVO). Together, SVO and SOV account for more than 87% of the world's languages, while the three "subject before object" orders make up almost 96%.
The term is often loosely used for ergative languages like Adyghe and Basque that in fact have agents instead of subjects.
Incidence
Among natural languages with a word order preference, SOV is the most common type (followed by subject–verb–object; the two types account for more than 87% of natural languages with a preferred order).
Languages that have SOV structure include:
most Indo-Iranian languages (Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hajong, Hindustani, Kurdish, Marathi, Nepali, Odia, Pāli, Pashto, Persian, Punjabi, Sindhi, Sinhala, Zaza) Ainu Akkadian Armenian Assyrian Aymara Basque Burushaski Cherokee Cushitic languages (Afar, Beja, Bilen, Oromo, Saho, Sidama, Somali) Dakota Dravidian languages (Brahvi, Duruwa, Gondi, Kannada, Kurukh, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, Tulu) Dogon languages Elamite Ethio-Semitic languages (Amharic, Tigre, Tigrinya) Gothic Ancient Greek Greenlandic Haida Hittite Hopi Ijoid languages Itelmen Japonic languages (Japanese, Hachijō, Ryukyuan languages) Kherwarian languages Koreanic languages (Korean, Jeju) Classical Latin Lakota Mande languages Marathi Mongolian Navajo Nivkh Nobiin Omaha-Ponca Omotic languages Quechua Samoyedic languages Santali Senufo languages Seri Sicilian Sri Lanka Malay Sumerian nearly all Tibeto-Burman languages (Burmese, Meitei, Newar, Sunwar, Lhasa Tibetan) Tungusic languages, including Evenki, Manchu and Xibe Turkic languages almost all Uto-Aztecan languages Yukaghir Zarma Zou virtually all languages of the Caucasus
Other languages allow for an SOV structure under certain conditions:
Standard Chinese is generally SVO but common constructions with verbal complements require SOV or OSV. Some Romance languages are SVO, but when the object is an enclitic pronoun, word order allows for SOV. German and Dutch are considered SVO in conventional typology and SOV in generative grammar. They can be considered SOV but with V2 word order as an overriding rule for the finite verb in main clauses, which results in SVO in some cases and VSO in others. For example, in German, a basic sentence such as "" ("I say something about Karl") is in SVO word order. Non-finite verbs are placed at the end, however, since V2 only applies to the finite verb: "" ("I want to say something about Karl"). In a subordinate clause, the finite verb is not affected by V2, and also appears at the end of the sentence, resulting in full SOV order: "" (Word-for-word: "Now say I [to] her that Karl a belt bought has.")
A rare example of SOV word order in English is "I (subject) thee (object) wed (verb)" in the wedding vow "With this ring, I thee wed."Andreas Fischer, "'With this ring I thee wed': The verbs to wed and to marry in the history of English". Language History and Linguistic Modelling: A Festschrift for Jacek Fisiak on his 60th Birthday. Ed. Raymond Hickey and Stanislaw Puppel. Trends in Linguistics, Studies and Monographs 101 (Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1997), pp.467-81
Properties SOV languages have a strong tendency to use postpositions rather than prepositions, to place auxiliary verbs after the action verb, to place genitive noun phrases before the possessed noun, to place a name before a title or honorific ("James Uncle" and "Johnson Doctor" rather than "Uncle James" and "Doctor Johnson") and to have subordinators appear at the end of subordinate clauses. They have a weaker but significant tendency to place demonstrative adjectives before the nouns they modify. Relative clauses preceding the nouns to which they refer usually signals SOV word order, but the reverse does not hold: SOV languages feature prenominal and postnominal relative clauses roughly equally. SOV languages also seem to exhibit a tendency towards using a time–manner–place ordering of adpositional phrases.
In linguistic typology, one can usefully distinguish two types of SOV languages in terms of their type of marking:
dependent-marking has case markers to distinguish the subject and the object, which allows it to use the variant OSV word order without ambiguity. This type usually places adjectives and numerals before the nouns they modify, and is exclusively suffixing without prefixes. SOV languages of this first type include Japanese and Tamil. head-marking distinguishes subject and object by affixes on the verb rather than markers on the nouns. It also differs from the dependent-marking SOV language in using prefixes as well as suffixes, usually for tense and possession. Adjectives in this type are much more verb-like than in dependent-marking SOV languages, and hence they usually follow the nouns. In most SOV languages with a significant level of head-marking or verb-like adjectives, numerals and related quantifiers (like "all", "every") also follow the nouns they modify. Languages of this type include Navajo and Seri.
In practice, of course, the distinction between these two types is far from sharp. Many SOV languages are substantially double-marking and tend to exhibit properties intermediate between the two idealised types above.
Many languages that have shifted to SVO word order from earlier SOV retain (at least to an extent) the properties; for example, the Finnish language, which retains a high usage of postpositions.
Examples Afroasiatic languages SOV word order is generally found in the Afroasiatic branches of the Ethiopian language area (Cushitic, Omotic, and contemporary Ethio-Semitic).
Afar
Amharic
Oromo
Somali Somali generally uses the subject–object–verb structure when speaking formally.
Tigre
Tigrinya
Wolaitta
Ainu The following example is from Hokkaido Ainu.
Austroasiatic languages Many Austroasiatic languages in South Asia exhibit SOV word order typical to the region. Santali
Ho
Basque Basque in short sentences, usually, subject or agent–object–verb; in long sentences, usually, subject or agent-verb-objects:
Anyway, both in spoken and written Basque, the pure SOV sentence (Eneritzek inork irakurri nahi ez zuen liburua eskatu du) is perfectly valid, just as the OVS order (Inork irakurri nahi ez zuen liburua eskatu du Eneritzek). In questions, fronting the verb in a VSO sentence is also correct (Eskatu (al) du Eneritzek inork irakurri nahi ez zuen liburua?), together with the usual SOV order (Eneritzek inork irakurri nahi ez zuen liburua eskatu (al) du?) or the SVO one (Eneritzek eskatu (al) du inork irakurri nahi ez zuen liburua?).
Dravidian languages The Dravidian languages commonly exhibit or prefer SOV order.
Kannada
Malayalam
Pustakam̥ + -e = pustakatte (പുസ്തകത്തെ)
Tamil Tamil being a strongly head-final language, the basic word-order is SOV. However, since it is highly inflected, word order is flexible and is used for pragmatic purposes. That is, fronting a word in a sentence adds emphasis on it; for instance, a VSO order would indicate greater emphasis on the verb, the action, than on the subject or the object. However, such word-orders are highly marked, and the basic order remains SOV.
Telugu
Georgian The Georgian language is not extremely rigid with regards to word order, but is typically either SOV or SVO.
Greenlandic The default word order for simple clauses in Greenlandic is SOV.
Indo-European languages SOV word order is quite common among Indo-European languages, leading to a common hypothesis that this reflects the original preferred word order of the ancestral Proto-Indo-European language. However, the question remains unsettled.
Albanian Albanian has free word order, but generally prefers SVO. SOV occurs only in poetic language.
Armenian Armenian generally prefers SOV.
Germanic languages Linguistic consensus holds that the Proto-Germanic language had free word order but preferred SOV. While some Germanic languages (including English and most North Germanic languages) have transitioned to SVO, SOV remains a feature of some major modern Germanic languages, including German and Dutch. However, these modern SOV Germanic languages also exhibit V2 word order, which supersedes the "default" SOV such that many sentences are rendered subject-verb-object.
Dutch Dutch is SOV combined with V2 word order. The non-finite verb (infinitive or participle) remains in final position, but the finite (i.e. inflected) verb is moved to the second position. Simple verbs look like SVO, non-finite verbs (participles, infinitives) and compound verbs follow this pattern:
Pure SOV order is found in subordinate clauses:
German German is SOV combined with V2 word order. The non-finite verb (infinitive or participle) remains in final position, but the finite (i.e. inflected) verb is moved to the second position. Simple verbs look like SVO, compound verbs follow this pattern:
The word order changes also depending on whether the phrase is a main clause or a dependent clause. In dependent clauses, the word order is always entirely SOV (cf. also Inversion):
Gothic The Gothic language, an extinct East Germanic language, had free word order, but SOV constructions were common.
Greek (Classical) Ancient Greek had free word order but generally preferred SOV sentences:
This is distinct from Modern Greek, where SVO is preferred.
Indo-Aryan languages Vedic Sanskrit, the oldest known of the Indo-Aryan languages, was an inflected language and very flexible in word order, allowing all possible word combinations. Its descendant, Classical Sanskrit, shared this feature but generally preferred SOV sentences.
Most later Indo-Aryan languages continue to prefer SOV word order, for example:
Bengali:
Hajong:
re is a particle that indicates the accusative case and 'sei' indicates past tense declarative. Here, e is pronounced as the 'i' in 'girl' and 'ei' is pronounced as the 'ay' in 'say'.
Hindi:
Marathi:
Nepali:
Odia:
Urdu:
This preference is not fixed in all Indo-Aryan languages. Punjabi, for instance, may be characterised as following a Subject—Object—Verb typology overall, but some flexibility is permitted, and this tendency does not follow in sentences involving personal pronouns. Examples are shown here in both Shahmukhi (top, right-to-left) and Gurmukhi (bottom, left-to-right). The word forms used reflect those typical of spoken language. For Shahmukhi, vocalised forms with vowel diacritics have been used to explicitly indicate the forms used; in typical writing these are omitted in most words where regular patterns allow this information to be inferred contextually.
The following sentence exhibits the typical SOV word order tendency. The verb phrase is in retrospective perfect participle form, indicating completion of the action, and takes on the feminine plural suffixes in agreement with the gender and number of the object. The subject here is a masculine plural form; in this context it does not require agreement from the verb.
By contrast, in the following sentence the person involved, referred to by a first-person pronoun, is the object rather than the subject. The significance of people as a semantic category takes precedent over the SOV word order tendency, and the person is typically first even in sentences where that person is the object. The pronoun "mainū̃" has the postposition "nū̃" agglutinated to it, approximately meaning "to." Abstract concepts like desires and emotions typically come "to" people as agentive subjects.