The typical structure of a sentence is subject – verb – object (SVO). Both subject and object are usually noun phrases or pronouns, which will be described below. The verb phrase will also be described below.

Note: Among the world’s languages, subject-object-verb (SOV) is somewhat more frequent (41%) than SVO (35%), but both are very common (WALS 81). SVO is used by eight of our ten source languages (all except for Hindi and Japanese) and by most creole languages (APiCS 1), therefore we prefer it.