In linguistic typology,–object– 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 water drank" would be an ordinary sentence, as opposed to the actual Standard English "Sam drank water" which is subject–verb–object (SVO).
The term is often loosely used for ergative languages like Adyghe and Basque that really 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, Hindustani, Marathi, Nepali, Pāli, Pashto, Persian, Punjabi, Sindhi, Sinhalese, Zazaki, Kurdish) Ainu Akkadian Amharic Armenian Assyrian Aymara Basque Burmese Burushaski Cherokee Dakota all Dravidian languages (Brahui, Duruwa, Gondi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, Tulu) Dogon languages Elamite Ancient Greek Hajong Hittite Hopi Ijoid languages Itelmen Japanese Hachijo Ryukyuan Korean Classical Latin Lakota Manchu Mande languages Meeteilon Mongolian Navajo Newari Nivkh Nobiin Omaha Quechua Senufo languages Seri Sicilian Sunuwar Somali and virtually all other Cushitic languages Sumerian Tibetan and nearly all other Tibeto-Burman languages Tigre Tigrinya Turkic languages almost all Uto-Aztecan languages Yukaghir Zarma virtually all Caucasian languages.
Standard Mandarin 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 (see the examples below). 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 SOV in others. For example, in German, a basic sentence such as "Ich sage etwas über Karl" ("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: "Ich will etwas über Karl sagen" ("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: "Ich sage, dass Karl einen Gürtel gekauft hat." (Word-for-word: "I say 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."
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.