Agent–object–verb

In linguistic typology, Subject Object Verb (SOV) is the type of languages in which the subject, object, and verb of a sentence appear (usually) in that order. If English were SOV, then "Sam oranges ate" would be an ordinary sentence. Among natural languages, SOV is the most common type. It corresponds roughly to reverse Polish notation in computer languages. The SOV languages include Korean, Turkish, Japanese, Persian, Latin, Burmese and most Indian languages.

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: 私は箱を開けます。(watashi wa hako wo akemasu.) meaning "I open a/the box/boxes." In this sentence, 私 (watashi) is the subject (or more specifically, topic) meaning "I" as in first person singular, and it is followed by the は (wa) subject marker. 箱 (hako) is the object meaning box (in Japanese no distinction is made between whether a word uses "a" or "the", or plural or singular unless specifically stated), followed by を (wo) which is the object marker in Japanese. 開けます (akemasu) is the verb which means "to open" and is at the end of the sentence.

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

• Subject Object Verb (SOV) Sam oranges eats. (for example Turkish, Korean, Japanese, Persian, Latin)
• Subject Verb Object (SVO) Sam eats oranges. (for example English, German, Kiswahili, Chinese)
• Verb Subject Object (VSO) Eats Sam oranges. (for example Welsh, Hawaiian and Arabic)
• Verb Object Subject (VOS) Eats oranges Sam. (for example Fijian)
• Object Verb Subject (OVS) Oranges eats Sam. (for example Hixkaryana, or the artificial language Klingon)
• Object Subject Verb (OSV) Oranges Sam eats. (for example the fictional character Yoda's unusual dialect of Basic)

See also

• Topic-prominent language