世界で一番多い語順は“日本語型”。1,376言語中564言語が「主語・目的語・動詞」

Which word order is the most common in the world? Many people guess the English order, as in "I ate an apple." But a big survey of 1,376 languages found something different. The most common order puts the verb at the end, like Japanese.

There are 564 languages with this order. The English order came second, with 488 languages. In one study, English speakers described short videos with only their hands. They put the action last, too.

Japanese puts the verb at the end of a sentence, and English puts it right after the subject. So which pattern is more common? The linguist Matthew Dryer looked at 1,376 languages for a world atlas of language features. He found 564 languages with the Japanese order, subject-object-verb, and 488 with the English order, subject-verb-object. The other four possible orders were much less common.

In 2008, a team led by Susan Goldin-Meadow of the University of Chicago asked speakers of English, Turkish, Spanish and Chinese to describe short videos using only gestures. People in all four groups showed the person first, then the object, and the action last. English speakers who said "The woman twists the knob" acted it out as "woman, knob, twist."

For English speakers, putting the verb second feels natural. Many of the world's languages do it differently. Matthew Dryer, writing for the World Atlas of Language Structures, sorted 1,376 languages by their basic order of subject, object and verb. Subject-object-verb, the Japanese pattern, came first with 564 languages, ahead of the English pattern with 488. In 2011, the physicist Murray Gell-Mann and the linguist Merritt Ruhlen went further.

After mapping word order onto a family tree of 2,135 languages, they argued that if all languages come from one ancestor, that ancestor put the verb last, and that most later changes moved toward the English type. In 2014, Luke Maurits and Thomas Griffiths tested this with statistical models of seven language families. They agreed that a change from subject-object-verb to subject-verb-object happens more often than the reverse.

But the chance that a shared ancestor used the Japanese order never rose much above 25 percent, and the single-ancestor idea is itself disputed. Gesture studies add another clue. Adults asked to act out events without speaking tended to show the doer, then the object, then the action, whatever language they spoke.