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( Subject Object Verb)
In linguistic typology, Subject Object Verb (SOV) is the type of languages in which the subject, object, and verb of a sentence appear or usually appear in that order. If English were SOV, then "Sam oranges ate" would be an ordinary sentence, as opposed to the proper "Sam ate oranges". Among natural languages with a word order preference, SOV is the most common type (followed by Subject Verb Object; the two types account for more than 75% of natural languages with a preferred order).[1] Languages that prefer SOV structure include Ainu, Akkadian, Amharic, Armenian, Aymara, Basque, Bengali, Burmese, Burushaski, Elamite, Hebrew, Hindi, Hittite, Hopi, Itelmen, Japanese, Kannada, Korean, Kurdish, Manchu, Marathi, Mongolian, Navajo, Nepali, Nivkh, Nobiin, Pali, Pashto, Persian, Punjabi, Quechua, Sanskrit, Sinhalese and most other Indo-Iranian languages, Somali and virtually all other Cushitic languages, Sumerian, Tamil, Tibetan, Telugu, Tigrinya, Turkic languages, Urdu, Yukaghir, and virtually all Caucasian languages. SOV languages have a strong tendency to use postpositions rather than prepositions, to place auxiliary verbs after the action verb, to place genitive noun phrases before the possessed noun, to place a name before a title or honorific ("James Uncle" and "Johnson Doctor" rather than "Uncle James" and "Doctor Johnson"), and to have subordinators appear at the end of subordinate clauses. They have a weaker but significant tendency to place demonstrative adjectives before the nouns they modify. Relative clauses preceding the nouns to which they refer usually signals SOV word order, though the reverse does not hold SOV languages feature prenominal and postnominal relative clauses roughly equally. SOV languages also seem to exhibit a tendency towards using a Time-Manner-Place ordering of adpositional phrases. One can usefully distinguish two types of SOV language in terms of their type of marking. The first, referred to in linguistic typology as dependent-marking, has case markers to distinguish the subject and the object, which allows it to use the variant OSV word order without ambiguity. This type usually places adjectives and numerals before the nouns they modify and is exclusively suffixing without prefixes. SOV languages of this first type include Japanese and Tamil.
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