  Most natural languages have a predominant or fixed word order. For example,
in English, the word order used most often is Subject-Verb-Object. This work
attempts to explain this phenomena as well as other typological findings
regarding word order from a functional perspective. That is, we target the
question of whether fixed word order gives a functional advantage, that may
explain why these languages are common. To this end, we consider an
evolutionary model of language and show, both theoretically and using a genetic
algorithm-based simulation, that an optimal language is one with fixed word
order. We also show that adding information to the sentence, such as case
markers and noun-verb distinction, reduces the need for fixed word order, in
accordance with the typological findings.
