OV language

In linguistics, an OV language is a language in which the object comes before the verb. OV languages compose approximately forty-seven percent of documented languages.

They are primarily left-branching, or head-final, i.e. heads are often found at the end of their phrases, with a resulting tendency to have the adjectives before nouns, to place adpositions after the noun phrases they govern (in other words, to use postpositions), to put relative clauses before their referents, and to place auxiliary verbs after the action verb. Of those OV languages that make use of affixes, many predominantly, or even exclusively, as in the case of Turkish, prefer suffixation to prefixation.