What is "subject-verb-object"

In linguistic typology, subject–verb–object (SVO) is a sentence structure where the subject comes first, the verb second, and the object third. Languages may be classified according to the dominant sequence of these elements. The label is often used for ergative languages which do not have subjects, but have an agent–verb–object order.

SVO is the second most common order by number of known languages, after SOV. Together, SVO and SOV account for more than 75% of the world's languages. It is also the most common order developed in Creole languages, suggesting that it may be somehow more initially 'obvious' to human psychology.

Languages regarded as SVO include: Albanian, Chinese, English, Estonian, Finnish (but see below), French, Kurdish, Ganda, Greek, Hausa, Icelandic (with the V2 restriction), Italian, Javanese, Khmer, Latvian, Macedonian, Modern Hebrew, Polish, Kashubian, Portuguese, Quiche, Romanian, Rotuman, Russian (but see below), Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, Swahili, Thai, Vietnamese, Yoruba and Zulu.

Ancient Greek has free syntactic order, although SOV tended to be preferred by Classical Greeks. Many famous phrases are SVO, however.