Word order

**Word order** is part of syntax, which is part of grammar. Word order may be different in different languages. For example, English "I play tennis only sometimes" would be in German _Ich spiele nur manchmal Tennis_, literally "I play only sometimes tennis". In Norwegian, the same sentence would be _Jeg spiller bare tennis noen ganger_ ("I play tennis only sometimes").

In Portuguese, the sentence could be _Eu só jogo tênis algumas vezes_ ("I only play tennis sometimes), but word order can be changed to _Eu jogo tênis só algumas vezes_ ("I play tennis only sometimes"). However, _Eu jogo só tênis algumas vezes_ is not allowed ("I play only tennis sometimes") because the meaning would be changed.

## Subject-verb-object

In English, a simple sentence with a verb (an action), subject (who or what is doing the action), and an object (to whom or what the action is done) is written with a subject-verb-object word order (SVO). For example, in the sentence "Robert opens the door", "Robert" is the subject, "opens" is the verb and "door" is the object. SVO is the second-most common word order among all languages and is used in 42% of them. Examples are Mandarin Chinese, Bahasa Melayu, Bahasa Indonesia, Spanish, French, Italian, Thai and Vietnamese. While some of the above languages can use other word orders, such as SOV and VSO, they use SVO for the simplest sentences.

In other languages, sentences can use other word orders. Consider _Robert opens the door_. In English, changing the word order to "The door opens Robert" would change the meaning of the sentence. In Latin, however, _Robertus ianuam aperit_ and _ianuam Robertus aperit_ mean the same.  _Ianuam_ is in the accusative case and so it is the direct object and _Robertus_ the subject. Changing the cases of the words, however, to _Robertem ianua aperit_ would change the meaning of the sentence: _ianua_ is now in the nominative case and so it is the subject and _Robertum_ the object.

## Subject-object-verb

The subject-object-verb (SOV) word order is the one that is used by the greatest number of distinct languages, 45% of them. It is especially common in the theoretical language family that is known as the Altaic language family, which includes many languages such as Japanese, Korean, Mongolian and the Turkic languages.

In Japanese, for example, a simple sentence uses SOV. In other words, the sentence "Robert opens the door" becomes "Robert the door opens". Such languages often use postpositions, which act like prepositions but appear after content words rather than before them, to show the role of a word in the sentence. The sample sentence "Robert opens the door" would be in Japanese ロバートはドアを開ける _Robāto-wa doa-o akeru_ in which は _wa_ as in ロバートは _Robāto-wa_ shows that ロバート _Robāto (Robert)_ is the topic of the sentence, and を _o_ as in ドアを _doa-o_ shows that ドア _doa_ is the direct object of the sentence. Around 45% of all languages are SOV languages.

## Verb-subject-object

The verb-subject-object (VSO) word order is the third-most common word order in world languages. There are far fewer VSO languages than SVO and SOV languages, and only 9% of them are VSO. Language groups in which VSO is common include Afroasiatic languages, such as Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic, and Celtic languages, such as Irish, Welsh and Cornish. In VSO languages, "Robert opens the door" would be "Opens Robert the door". Spanish sentences are usually SVO, but VSO is also common. In Spanish, the example above  can be as _Roberto abre la puerta_ (Robert opens the door) or _Abre Roberto la puerta_ (Opens Robert the door).

## Other types

Aside from SVO, SOV, and VSO, other kinds of word orders are rather uncommon. VOS word order makes up at around 3% of all languages, and languages that begin with the object (OVS and OSV) are extremely few, each around 1-0% percent each.