Interestingly, the most frequent order is not the SVO of English and most European languages but the SOV (with the verb at the end of the sentence) of Japanese, Korean, and Turkish.
For speakers of English, the SVO order is so familiar that it may seem inevitable. But quite the reverse. There are six ways of ordering three items (S, V, O), and the world’s languages display them all (Figure 4.3). Interestingly, the most frequent order is not the SVO of English and most European languages but the SOV (with the verb at the end of the sentence) of Japanese, Korean, and Turkish.