Do adjectives come before or after the noun?

By Chase Morgan · Published 27 October 2026 · Data: WALS Online 2013 edition (CLDF release v2020.4)

After it, in most languages. Of the 1,367 languages WALS codes for this feature, 879 (64%) place a modifying adjective after the noun, as Spanish, French and Swahili do. Another 373 (27%) place it before, like English, Russian and Japanese. Eurasia is the only macro-area where adjective-before-noun is the larger group.

The question is about the dominant order of a modifying adjective and its noun, as in “a red house” against “a house red”. WALS puts 110 languages (8%) in a group where both orders occur and neither dominates.

A regional habit

The split between the two orders is mostly geographic. In Africa, 303 of 358 coded languages (85%) put the adjective after the noun, and in Papunesia 80% do. Eurasia is the exception: 187 of 337 (55%) put the adjective first. That Eurasian block includes Hindi, Turkish, Korean and Mandarin, while Italian and Welsh in western Europe go the other way.

Weakly tied to verb order

For many pairs of features, a language’s position is tied to the order of object and verb. Adjectives are a weak case. Among languages coded for both features, 36% of object-before-verb languages put the adjective first, against 19% of object-after-verb languages.

Both groups prefer the adjective after the noun. A rule of the form “verb-final languages put adjectives first” would be wrong for most of them: 332 object-before-verb languages place the adjective after the noun, more than place it before. The note on verb order and adpositions compares this weak link with the strong ones.

Demonstratives and numerals

Adjectives are not the only words that sit next to a noun. Demonstratives (“this”, “that”) come before the noun in 542 of the 1,225 languages coded and after it in 562, a much closer split than for adjectives. Numerals divide in a similar way: 479 languages put the numeral first and 608 after, out of 1,154. So a language with the adjective after the noun often has the demonstrative or the numeral before it. Spanish is an example: adjective after the noun, but demonstrative and numeral before it, as in “estas tres casas blancas”, “these three white houses”. Swahili and Indonesian put the demonstrative after the noun as well.

The family table shows how family and region combine. Indo-European and Altaic, both mostly in Eurasia, prefer the adjective before the noun; Niger-Congo and Austronesian overwhelmingly put it after.

Where neither order wins

The group without a dominant order is small overall but not evenly spread. In Australia it covers 18 of 98 coded languages (18%), and in South America 16 of 121. In Africa it is only 15 of 358, and in Eurasia 20 of 337. Papunesia falls in between, with 26 of its 307 coded languages showing no dominant order. North America is the most evenly divided area between the two main orders, with 59 languages putting the adjective first and 67 after it. A learner who meets an adjective in an unexpected place in one of these languages may simply be looking at the freer order the atlas records.

The map in the chapter’s words

The WALS chapter on this feature describes the area of adjective-after-noun order in Africa as extending north into southwest Europe and northeast into the Middle East, and a second large region of the same order from northeast India through Southeast Asia and east among the Austronesian languages into the Pacific, except in the Philippines. The largest area of adjective-before-noun order covers much of Europe and Asia outside those regions; within Africa, the chapter points to pockets of it in Ethiopia, in central Africa and among Khoisan languages in the south.

A note for learners

For anyone learning a language, the useful fact is that both orders are normal. English speakers learning French or Spanish meet the adjective after the noun; speakers of those languages learning English meet the reverse. Both groups are large in the atlas. Language pages on this site show the adjective row in the order diagram at the top, next to the genitive, the demonstrative and the numeral, so the whole noun phrase can be read at a glance.

WALS counts adjectives that modify a noun directly. A handful of languages, 5 in the atlas, are listed separately because their adjectives do not modify nouns but occur as predicates in internally headed relative clauses. The figures describe the WALS sample, which covers families broadly but is not every language spoken today.

To check a specific pair of languages, the contrast tool lists this feature with all the others both are coded for; English against French makes a short example. The page for Order of Adjective and Noun maps every coded language by value.