Word Order

Gell-Man and Ruhlen prove that the Mother Tongue had SOV word order. Except for instances of diffusion, the direction of syntactic change is mostly from SOV to SVO. After that phase, SVO becomes VSO/VOS before reversion to SVO through diffusion, although diffusion is not the most important factor in the development of word order. The two rarest word orders – OVS and OSV – derive directly from SOV.

Five of the six branches of the Dené-Sino-Caucasian macrofamily have exclusive SOV word order. (Subject-Object-Verb). The other branch, Sino-Tibetan, has mainly SOV except Chinese, Bai and Karen with SVO (Subject-Verb-Object).

In Eurasiatic, 149 languages have SOV, 59 have SVO and 6, (the Island Celtic languages), have VSO. This remains a mystery and the search for substrates continue.

Nilo-Saharan has SOV, SVO and VSO. Songhai and Saharan have SOV while Kuliak and the Nilotic languages have predominantly VSO.

Niger-Congo has 35 SOV and 264 SVO, and the Ntu-group has 1 SOV and 118 SVO.

‘The distribution of word order types in the world’s languages, interpreted in terms of the putative phylogenetic tree of human languages, strongly supports the hypothesis that the original word order in the ancestral language was SOV. Furthermore, in the vast majority of known cases (excluding diffusion), the direction of change has been almost uniformly SOV > SVO and, beyond that, primarily SVO > VSO/VOS. There is also evidence that the two extremely rare word orders, OVS and OSV, derive directly from SOV.’*

*Gell-Man, Murray & Ruhlen, Merritt. (2011). The origin and evolution of word order. Santa Fe Institute, Stanford University.

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