[Column] Word order

Gwon Jae-il, Seoul National University Professor of Linguistics

The layout of the main components within a sentence is called the "basic word order." The language families of the world fall into any of six types of word order formats, depending on the position of the subject (S), verb (V), and object (O) in a basic sentence: SVO, SOV, VSO, VOS, OVS, and OSV. Every language family has a basic word order.

Most languages fall into the first three categories; in fact, the first two ("SVO" and "SOV") account for 75 percent of the world’s languages. "VOS" and "OVS" are extremely rare, and "OSV" is so rare that it only became known recently. That means it is very unusual to find a language where the object (O) comes before the subject (S). The language of Madagascar, in the Indian Ocean, is a "VOS" language but this category only accounts for 2 percent of the world's language. ’OVS’ languages are only found in a few of the tongues spoken in northern Brazil. If you translate the VOS sentence "manaja tena Rabe," from Malagasy, it would be "respect himself Rabe," or in English syntax, "Rabe respects himself." "OSV" languages are only found in deep in the Amazon, where the Apurniã people say "anana nota apa," "pineapple I fetch," which means, "I fetch a pineapple."

Korean is a SOV language, so "I [a] newspaper read" is your basic word order. Other SOV languages include Japanese, Mongolian, Turkish, and Hindi.

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