Which word order is most common in the world's languages?

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

Subject–object–verb. Of the 1,376 languages WALS codes for basic word order, 564 (41%) put the subject first, the object second and the verb last, as Japanese, Turkish and Hindi do. Subject–verb–object, the order of English, Mandarin and Swahili, comes second with 488 (35%). Together the two cover 76% of the coded languages.

Those two orders share one property: the subject comes before the object. Every other arrangement is far rarer in the atlas, and the further the object moves to the front, the rarer it gets.

What counts as a basic order

The WALS chapter on this feature, by Matthew S. Dryer, looks at declarative clauses in which both the subject and the object are nouns, as in “the dog bit the man”. A language is placed in one of the six types when one order is the dominant one, by frequency of use or pragmatic neutrality. Languages where no order dominates form a separate group, and it is large: 189 languages, 14% of the sample. The chapter names three kinds. Some have highly flexible order, with all or most orders common. Some vary only in where the subject or only where the object goes. In others the choice is set by the syntax: in German and Dutch, the chapter notes, the order is SVO in main clauses without an auxiliary and SOV in subordinate clauses and clauses with an auxiliary, so neither counts as dominant.

Verb-first languages

Putting the verb first is the third most frequent pattern. Verb–subject–object has 95 languages (7%), among them Irish, Welsh, Tagalog, Hawaiian and Maori. Verb–object–subject is rarer at 25; the best documented example in the atlas is Malagasy, joined by Kiribati and Batak (Toba). North America stands out here: 36 of the 176 North American languages coded for this feature are verb–subject–object, 20%, against 7% for the atlas as a whole. Many of them belong to the Pacific Northwest and to the Mayan family of Central America.

Object-first orders are the rarest

Only 15 languages in the atlas put the object before both the verb and the subject. Object–verb–subject has 11; the textbook case is Hixkaryana, a Cariban language of Brazil, and 7 of the 11 are in South America. Object–subject–verb has just 4, and none of them is coded for enough other features to have a page here. Together the two object-first orders account for 1% of the languages coded, against 83% for the three orders that put the subject before the object.

How the regions differ

The global count hides large regional contrasts. In Africa, subject–verb–object dominates: 244 of 363 languages, 67%. In Eurasia the balance flips to subject–object–verb, with 195 of 295 (66%), among them Turkish, Persian, Hindi, Japanese and Korean. Australia has the largest share of languages without a dominant order: 43 of 95, 45%.

These macro-areas are WALS’s own division of the world. Papunesia covers New Guinea, the islands of the Pacific and island South-East Asia, which is why Austronesian languages with verb-first orders and Papuan languages with verb-final ones sit in the same row.

A sample, not a census

WALS is a sample of the world’s languages, not a complete list, and each chapter codes the languages its author could document. The shares above therefore describe the 1,376 languages coded for this feature, not every language spoken today. Large families are represented by a selection of their members, so a family’s share of the sample is not its share of the world’s languages.

Families that hold one order

Some families keep a single order across almost all their members, and they weigh on the totals. All 68 Trans-New Guinea languages coded are subject–object–verb, as are 81 of the 89 Sino-Tibetan languages. Niger-Congo leans the other way, with 173 of its 187 coded languages subject–verb–object. Austronesian is less uniform: 98 of 168 are subject–verb–object, and much of the rest is verb-first.

Where to go next

The page for Order of Subject, Object and Verb has one map for each order, the full table by macro-area and the families that are most and least uniform. Every language page on this site opens with its basic order and a diagram of how it orders the other parts of the phrase. To see two languages side by side, try English against Japanese in the contrast tool, or pick any pair from 581 languages.