Basic word order. In a short sentence, tell me: what did the capybara just do?
Let me guess, something like, "The capybara ate corn." Good English skills, gold stars! But that's
not the only way languages around the world order information. What If instead of "animal ate food", you
used the most popular order, "animal food ate" like almost every language in India? Or "ate
food animal" like in Madagascar? But one order stands out as particularly, incredibly unusual:
"food animal ate". Meet OSV, the world's rarest word order.
[homemade opening synth music, inviting but with mysterious edge]
In my teens I craved learning about as many languages as possible.
Slogging through texts I found languages described again and again by their basic
word order in three large letters. I studied an SVO language, an SOV language, a VSO language. A decade
later, VOS. Another had free word order, as if it sloshed between any it wanted. In my mind these
word order signs took on a life of their own. Less as grammatical facts, more essential types, like a
linguistic horoscope whose signs identified any language that exists. The strange properties of
this kind of linguistic horoscope left me curious for years. Some signs are quite crowded. Some signs
are exceptionally rare. Only recently did I finally return to the books to find out why.
Now, so much to read for this and it started to connect to like everything ever written about
sentences. But surprises await, stuff I just gotta share. Today, wonder with me: what is word order?
Which languages have different ones and where? Why are some so common while this one is so rare?
What were these linguistic horoscope signs I'd been meeting across the years? What did it mean
to define every language by where the esses, vees and oes go in a sentence? Well, try this activity. Say a
neutral sentence that states some information. No complications. No questions, commands or negations.
Just facts. Like my capybara sentence, yours should have one verb: an action like cook or
eat. (Wow, must be hungry!) And one subject and one object. Oh, make sure: no pronouns. If this feels
rigged, hold that thought. Follow the instructions and you probably have a basic sentence. Mark the
verb with a V, the subject S and the object O, and voilà! Your language's type, its basic word order.
Ehhh, there's some mechanics to these three letters I wish someone would've sat down and animated
for me. They'll matter later. Don't think about it too much, just watch the pretty letters move.
Since each type is made up of three letters, that means if we move one letter we can switch between
two different orders, like moving S from the very end to the very front. Also, if we hold one steady,
like pin that S, there are only two possibilities. The other two symbols, V and O here, swap places to
create two different orders. However you swap letters or hold them steady, there are only
a handful of possible word orders. How many? Well, you could figure this out the hard way, doing our
exercise across a planet full of people speaking thousands of languages, eventually realizing you
always get one of six orders. Or the maths-minded among you spotted we already limited ourselves by
how we set up this activity: one times two times three letters makes six. Either way, all languages
fall into one of six types. Asterisk. Mm, there's a hitch. Even when you follow instructions, often
enough you'll assign multiple sentence types to a single language. Sometimes you find one order
more, others less. Sometimes it almost feels like there's no word order at all, it's fully flexible.
But no matter, these indecisive types are surely a little ant that won't come back to bite us before
the video is over. So what is your language's sign? I mean, type? Because, intriguingly, our little activity
shows us the six orders aren't equally common or evenly spread across the world. How many? Where?
Step back and count. The majority of us speak just two types of languages. The most popular?
Not subject verb object. That's second.
It's subject object verb. Notice what both have in common? Putting S first is
the most common thing you can do by a long shot. Next, two uncommons both start with V. At a distant
third place is verb subject object. The fourth is quite a bit less frequent still and in fact
shares something with the two rares below it. Spot it? Well, finally both rares start with O. Drop down to OVS,
with your subject at the very end and our order of the day, OSV, I'll say it again rarest of all.
Besides rare, uncommon and common, we can split top three from bottom three. (Or most special three.)
Did you pick up on what the three least common have in common? We'll come back to them but
together they're odd enough that an early big name to do this word order work thought no
language might even have them. Where can you catch the usuals and unusuals, the commons uncommons and
rares? Around the world, SOV, yes you're number one! You're widespread. Number two, SVO, you're common in
big pockets, superregions really, but less common elsewhere, and also limited to specific families.
You one in ten VSO languages out there aren't too hard to find if we try. Together you three types
bundle up the vast majority of languages. Where are the three least common orders? You VOS are few
but still peek through some places. Lastly the rarest types are associated with the same area.
(And with a green long-eared space jedi. Not to split the fandom here, but OSV Yoda uses.
At least in English and Brazilian Portuguese.) But in our galaxy, on this planet, you'd do well to zoom
in on the greater Amazon, where people speak languages like Apurinã and Warao.
Back to my earlier question, one last chance to guess. What do the top three have in common
that you, dear OSV types, are doing ~ahem~ wrong? Linguists wondered why you're last in the rankings.
Are you flouting some universal trends? Starting with Universal #1: please avoid putting your
S after your O. What if these aren't just trends you're defying but deeper settings?
Linguists could spend days comparing lists of word order principles to explain but notice
that Vs and Os are normally stuck together: S-"OV" and S-"VO". And yet you chose to be one of only
two types that break up the V and its O. Also notice most of us give priority to our theme
or topic, usually the subject: the "S"-OV the "S"-VO. But you put your object, the least important info,
first. When you do that aren't you distributing information in the most uneven way possible?
Ooh and what if those settings are in our brains? Perhaps children learn to set O and V direction
then their stickiness before learning where S goes. In that case it's like human language
itself is against OSV and humans all share some natural preference: SOV more common in
the past, SOV across all continents even SOV inside your thoughts.
And yet OSV, here you are. You exist.
Time to bite back and ask the linguists, Just how universal are your universals, basic are your
basics? Because seems you think you're clocking languages as obviously SVO or SOV when in
reality... well, bring back the mysterious flexible type we set aside earlier. The ants are biting.
Four quick bites from this same continent. In Brazilian Sign Language, Libras for short, sentences
shift between SOV or SVO or OSV depending on the meaning and the grammar of the V and the O.
In Warao, storytellers go from OSV to SOV when they introduce a new character.
Over time, Spanish word order made Guaraní change from SOV to SVO. And Macuxi people use OVS and
SOV, but one researcher calls for better vernacular data, especially women's speech, to understand more.
All this flexing doesn't mean universals aren't fundamental. They're just part of a bigger process.
Word order is shaped by settings but, even more, by other languages, the ones around yours and the
ones before yours. All this gets filtered through "cees" of change. Four Cs. Linguistic constraints, like
in Libras. Context, like in Warao storytelling. Colonization, in fact multiple authors ask if SVO
being so common isn't natural but colonial. And culture, like in Macuxi, which bonus challenges
us with: are non-standard vernaculars actually closer to universals? And is what's most normal
really variation? (Whatever the capybara sentence order, from meaning alone we expect the food
isn't the one doing the eating.) Try the activity from before with a Korean language textbook and
you'll easily call it an SOV language. Do the same thing but listen to Koreans speak and you'll learn
two things. One, plenty of sentences don't even have both a subject and an object. Two, even when they do,
Koreans regularly use OSV order. They aren't alone. Do the same activity again with Maya in Mexico
and this time you'll find basic VOS and still pretty basic SVO sentences. You'll also hear OSV.
Ah, our rarest word order! How is it showing up here though? This isn't the Amazon and these
aren't OSV languages. Well, instead of our linear order of Ss, Os and Vs, here's what's basic
for them. You state your sentence's topic. (Both languages audibly mark it.) Then the rest of your
sentence is a comment on that topic. What a way to organize information! Now a topic is different from
your focus; we can talk more about this another time. Just a rule of thumb. The focus tends to be
before the verb, while the topic tends to be before everything. And that doesn't conflict with – in fact
it often invites – sentences that are topic O, focus S, then V. Like Libras, Warao, Macuxi and Apurinã,
Korean and Maya remind us that people speak with variety everywhere. Which really gunks up our neat
linguistic horoscope. If not just indecisive languages but all languages flex, some just
have stronger preferences, then word orders aren't signs or categories. They're more like gradients.
So why do languages end up with the type they have? Not "is" but "does". OSV isn't the essence of
what any language is, merely a shortcut label for what it does as the outcome of our process where
underlying variation and flexibility themselves are fundamentals. And so it is with Apurinã.
Remember earlier when I asked if this word order activity felt... rigged? Well, capybara sentences,
you know, ones with a full noun object, a full noun subject, a verb and no pronoun, are in Apurinã
basically and commonly OSV. That said, such full basic sentences appear to be the least common kind
of Apurinã sentence on record. This makes OSV the commonest order in their most uncommon sentences.
If consistency isn't the point of language, being a consistent type isn't the point either.
Communication is. SOV or OSV may be less your language's sign, more a messy spectrum of use
and variation. That doesn't make them useless. Because somewhere in that spectrum, thanks to
everything that went into this process, some people still speak a few special languages that tend to
use OSV in basic sentences. And the foremost place where that's true is in the Amazon and northern
South America. While reading about their rare word order, it was hard to miss stories about
each of these people struggling for their lives and languages. Please consider supporting not just
the rain forests but the mouths and hands that speak and act to protect their water and land.
Links to more below. Thanks to you, and to all my patrons. Oh, we finally reached
a huge milestone, one million subscribers! Looking forward to our future, so
if you stick around, I will too, for more linguistic tales with you.
[musicbox synth drifts from earlier tune to channel theme]