When you travel across India, the way people build sentences changes almost as often as the landscape. You’ll hear words land in an order that sounds “backward” to English speakers. Yet, for millions, it feels perfectly natural.
India’s languages split into families. The two biggest? Indo-Aryan (name assigned by “linguists”) in the north (think Hindi, Bengali, Marathi), and Dravidian in the south (think Tamil, Telugu, Kannada). Both use Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) as their standard order. So you’ll often get “I the ball threw” instead of “I threw the ball.” This isn’t some odd quirk. It’s a consistent pattern, followed for centuries.
Why mention this in a post about writing? Well. I read a blog post The Day You Became A Better Writer and some of the comments mentioned that our brain may have a preference for a certain arrangement. I think Indian languages destroy the myth that our brains are hardwired for English-style word order. Linguists like Noam Chomsky argue that humans might have a “universal grammar” in our heads. But if SVO (Subject-Verb-Object) was the only setting, more than a billion people in India would struggle. They don’t. Kids in Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh grow up speaking SOV as easily as kids in Texas speak SVO.
Even within India, language families vary. Some tribal and regional languages—like Khasi or Kokborok, use SVO, just like English or Chinese. Others flip things further. Malayalam and Kannada often bend word order for emphasis, clarity, or even humor.
So what’s the lesson you say? Don’t get stuck thinking there’s just one “natural” way to express ideas. What matters isn’t copying English grammar rules, but making your meaning clear to your reader. Good writing means putting ideas in the order your audience expects. Sometimes, that means leading with the subject. Sometimes, the action matters more, as the original article suggests. And sometimes, the object is the star of the show.
Indian languages show there’s no single right way. There’s only what works. That’s the real “universal rule” of good writing, anywhere.
Until later! 👋