A Handbook of Kyrgyz Grammar/Word Order

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Word Order[edit | edit source]

Kyrgyz is a “Subject-Object-Verb” language. This means that the person or thing doing the action comes first in the sentence, and the verb is at the end. Compare this with English, which is a Subject-Verb-Object language:

Мен     дүкөнгө    барам : “I go to the store.”
I         to the store      go

Possessives (like English “my,” “your,” etc.) and adjectives precede the noun that they modify.

кызыл китеп : “a red book”
  red      book

Other than keeping adjectives in front of their respective nouns and the finite verb at the end of the sentence, word order is much more elastic than it is in English, since much grammar that in English is carried by word order is communicated in Kyrgyz by suffixes.