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 Turkish, Japanese, Korean, Manchu, Mongolian, Ainu, Nivkh, Yukaghir, Itelmen, Persian, Pashto, Kurdish, Burushaski, Basque, Latin, Burmese, Tibetan, Amharic, Tigrinya, Abkhaz, Abaza, Adyghe, Avar, Kabardian, Sumerian, Akkadian, Elamite, Hittite, Navajo, Hopi, Aymara, Quechua, Pāli, Nepali, Sinhalese and most Indian languages.

German and Dutch are considered SVO in conventional typology and SOV in generative grammar. See V2 word order. French, Portuguese, Spanish and Italian are SVO, but use SOV when a pronoun is used as the (direct or indirect) object: e.g., "Sam a mangé des oranges", "Sam comeu laranjas" or "Sam comió naranjas" or "Sam ha mangiato delle arance" (Sam ate oranges) would become "Sam les a mangées", "Sam as comeu" or "Sam las comió" or "Sam le ha mangiate" (Sam them ate). This type of ordering is sometimes (although rarely) used in English under poetic license, especially in works of William Shakespeare.

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) topic-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, pronounced "oh" in this usage) which is the object-marker in Japanese. 開けます (akemasu) is the polite non-past form of the verb which means "to open" and is at the end of the sentence. Typical polite usage habitually suppresses direct reference to persons, preferring instead verbs of implied direction: 本を下さい　(hon o kudasai, "Please give me the book"), a literal approximation for which might be, "hand the book down, please," although the English is far too breezy in tone.

Although Latin was an inflected language, the most usual word order was SOV. An example would be: "servus puellam amat", meaning "The slave loves the girl." In this sentence, "servus" is the subject, "puellam" is the object and "amat" is the verb.

See also

• Topic-prominent language
• Verb Subject Object
• Subject Verb Object