Word order |
English equivalent |
Proportion of languages |
Example languages | |
---|---|---|---|---|
SOV | "Cows grass eat." | 45% | Ancient Greek, Bengali, Burmese, Hindi/ Urdu, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Oromo, Persian, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, Turkish, etc | |
SVO | "Cows eat grass." | 42% | Chinese, English, French, Hausa, Hebrew, Arabic, Italian, Malay, Portuguese, Spanish, Swahili, Thai, Vietnamese, etc | |
VSO | "Eat cows grass." | 9% | Biblical Hebrew, Classical Arabic, Filipino, Geʽez, Irish, Māori, Tuareg-Berber, Welsh | |
VOS | "Eat grass cows." | 3% | Car, Fijian, Malagasy, Qʼeqchiʼ, Terêna | |
OVS | "Grass eat cows." | 1% | Hixkaryana, Urarina | |
OSV | "Grass cows eat." | 0% | Tobati, Warao | |
Frequency distribution of word order in languages surveyed by Russell S. Tomlin in the 1980s [1] [2] ( ) |