Importance of Word Order

Language is a way of communication of the environment it is born onto, and has been altered through years. It has the characteristics of culture, history and daily life of society it is used in, and underwent and still undergoes changes in terms of those characteristics. Thus, language differs everywhere in terms of its features, pronunciations, alphabet and word order. Letters form words and words become sentences, it happens this way in every society, and this can be the only similarity between languages. However, the word order in sentences differ from language to language, and linguistics still debate this topic and conduct studies to find the reasons for it, but there is still not a certain reason for this.

Some languages have the word order of subject – verb – object, SVO, meanwhile others have different word orders. Categorization of word orders is called Language Types, and it has types of subject – object – verb, object – verb – subject and such, and it differs depending on the environment it is used in. It is SVO in English, but it is OSV in Apurina used in South America, and VSO in Welsh. For example, we say “I bought a computer” in English, meanwhile it is “A computer I bought” in Apurina and “Bought I a computer” in Welsh.

We can omit subject in some of languages, the same as we omit subject in Relative Clauses in English. For example, Turkish is an agglutinating language which means that Turkish words are combination of smaller morphemes which have its own meaning. Consequently, in some Turkish sentences there is no subject, it is omitted, but there is a hidden subject. For instance, we say “I did”, in English with a subject, but we can say “did”, yaptım, in Turkish. When we syllabify it, it is ‘yap-tım’, and ‘tım’ indicates ‘I’, the subject of the sentence. We can omit subject in Slavic and Romance languages as well, and in Korean, we can omit anything except verb of the sentence. Additionally, Turkish has its own interrogative particles for interrogative sentences such as, ‘-mı, -mi, -mısın, -misin, -musun, -müsün’, meanwhile most of the other languages have question words, just use question mark or stress the words in order to indicate that they are asking questions.

Characteristics of languages are not limited to only these, but to more, more like limitless. However, no matter how much characteristics they have, they only depend on word order and language types. Linguistics conduct studies to classify languages into languages types, and the word order criteria is the most important point. If a linguist wants to analyse a language, or conduct a study, they must know most of the details of the language. Just like we must translate a paper by paying attention to the rules of its language, they must take up their studies by paying attention to its own rules. They can’t have right information and results for the study as long as they don’t consider characteristics of the language. For example, German has SVO language type, and if a German wants to conduct a study for Turkish language, they must analyse it as SOV to have reliable results.

In conclusion, languages have undergone radical changes through ages. It has gotten shaped by the environment it is used in, so it differs in every parts of the world. Linguistics conduct works to classify language into language types, and the word order is the most important point they should focus on because it differs in each language. As long as they don’t consider the word order, they can’t obtain accurate answers to their questions.