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English puts the verb between subject and object ('she reads books'), but most of the world's languages don't. The World Atlas of Language Structures found that about 41% of the languages it surveyed put the verb last, as Turkish and Japanese do; English-style order comes second, at about 35%.

World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS), Chapter 81

Language

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The atlas, edited by the linguists Matthew Dryer and Martin Haspelmath, compared almost 1,400 languages for this chapter. Orders that put the verb first, as in Welsh and Classical Arabic, are much rarer, around 9% together, and orders that put the object before the subject are rarest of all; Hixkaryana, spoken in the Brazilian Amazon, is a well-known example. About 14% of languages have no single dominant order. In Turkish, subject-object-verb is only the default: because endings show each word's role, speakers can move words around for emphasis ('Kitabı Ali okudu', 'It was Ali who read the book') without confusing who did what. English relies on word order for that job, so it has far less freedom.

Türkçe oku
İngilizce fiili özne ile nesnenin arasına koyar (“she reads books”, yani “o kitap okur”), ama dünyadaki dillerin çoğu böyle yapmaz. Dünya Dil Yapıları Atlası'nın incelediği dillerin yaklaşık yüzde 41'i, Türkçe ve Japonca gibi fiili sona koyar; İngilizcedeki sıra yaklaşık yüzde 35'le ikinci gelir.

Dilbilimciler Matthew Dryer ile Martin Haspelmath'ın yayına hazırladığı atlas, bu bölüm için 1.400'e yakın dili karşılaştırdı. Fiili başa alan diziler, örneğin Galce ve Klasik Arapçadaki gibi, çok daha seyrektir: ikisi birlikte yüzde 9 kadar tutar. Nesneyi özneden önce getiren diziler ise en nadir olanlardır; Brezilya Amazonu'nda konuşulan Hixkaryana bunun bilinen bir örneğidir. Dillerin yaklaşık yüzde 14'ünde ise baskın tek bir dizi yoktur. Türkçede özne-nesne-yüklem sırası yalnızca varsayılan sıradır: her kelimenin görevini ekler gösterdiği için, kimin ne yaptığı karışmadan vurgu uğruna kelimelerin yeri değiştirilebilir (“Kitabı Ali okudu” gibi). İngilizce bu işi kelime sırasıyla gördüğü için çok daha az serbesttir.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Word order
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