Subject Object Verb

In linguistic typology, Subject Object Verb (SOV) is the general order of words in a language's sentences: "Sam oranges ate". The SOV type is the most common type found in natural languages. It corresponds roughly to reverse Polish notation in computer languages. Turkish, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Latin and most Indian languages belong to this category.

German and Dutch are basically SOV, but employ SVO in main clauses. See V2 word order.

SOV languages tend to have the adjectives before nouns, to use postpositions rather than prepositions, to place relative clauses before the nouns to which they refer, and to place auxiliary verbs after the action verb. Some have special particles to distinguish the subject and the object, such as the Japanese ga and o. SOV languages also seem to exhibit a tendency towards using a Time-Manner-Place ordering of prepositional phrases.

An example in Japanese is: 私は昨日ご飯を食べた watashi wa kinō gohan wo tabeta ("I ate rice yesterday"), in which watashi is the subject (topic, to be precise), gohan is the object and tabeta is the verb (past tense form of "taberu").

The other permutations in the order of most common to rarest are:

• Subject Verb Object Sam ate oranges. (e.g. English, Spanish, Italian, Kiswahili, Chinese)
• Verb Subject Object Ate Sam oranges. (e.g. Welsh and Arabic)
• Verb Object Subject Ate oranges Sam. (e.g. Fijian)
• Object Subject Verb Oranges Sam ate. (e.g. Xavante)
• Object Verb Subject Oranges ate Sam. (e.g. Guarijio, Hixkaryana, and Klingon)