| Order |
Example |
Usage |
Languages
|
| SOV |
"Sam apples ate." |
45%
|
|
Ainu, Akkadian, Amharic, Ancient Greek, Armenian, Aymara, Bambara, Basque, Bengali, Burmese, Burushaski, Chukchi, Cushitic languages, Dravidian languages, Elamite, Hindustani, Hittite, Hopi, Itelmen, Japanese, Korean, Kurdish, Latin, Lhasa Tibetan, Manchu, Mongolian, Munda languages, Nahuatl, Navajo, Nepali, Nivkh, Northeast Caucasian languages, Northwest Caucasian languages, Pali, Pashto, Persian, Quechua, Sanskrit, Sinhala, Tamil, Tigrinya, Turkic languages, Yukaghir
|
| SVO |
"Sam ate apples." |
42%
|
|
Arabic (modern spoken varieties), Chinese, Estonian, Finnish, Hausa, Hebrew, Indonesian, Kashmiri, Malay, most European languages, Pa'O, Swahili, Thai, Vietnamese, Yucatec Maya
|
| VSO |
"Ate Sam apples." |
9%
|
|
Arabic (classical and modern standard), Berber languages, Biblical Hebrew, Celtic languages, Filipino, Geʽez, Kariri, Mayan languages, Polynesian languages
|
| VOS |
"Ate apples Sam." |
3%
|
|
Algonquian languages, Arawakan languages, Car, Chumash, Fijian, K'iche, Malagasy, Otomanguean languages, Qʼeqchiʼ, Salishan languages, Terêna
|
| OVS |
"Apples ate Sam." |
1%
|
|
Äiwoo, Hixkaryana, Urarina
|
| OSV |
"Apples Sam ate." |
0%
|
|
Haida, Tobati, Warao
|
| Frequency distribution of word order in languages surveyed by Russell S. Tomlin in the 1980s[1][2] ()
|
