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In linguistic typology, subject–verb–object 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 in unmarked sentences. English is included in this group. An example is "Sam ate oranges." The label often includes ergative languages that 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: All Bantu languages, Albanian, Arabic dialects, Assyrian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Chinese, English, Estonian, Finnish , French, Greek, Hausa, Icelandic , Igbo, Italian, Javanese, Khmer, Latvian, Macedonian, Malay , Modern Hebrew, Norwegian , Polish, Portuguese, Quiché, Reo Rapa, Romanian, Russian , Slovene, Spanish, Swedish , Thai, Toki Pona, and Lao, Ukrainian , Vietnamese and Yoruba.
Ancient Greek has free syntactic order, though Classical Greeks tended to favor SOV. Many famous phrases are SVO, however.