V2 word order

Old English followed a consistent V2 word order.

V2 word order occurs outside of Germanic, for instance in Kashmiri.

Swedish utilizes V2 word order in subclauses, a phenomenon rarely encountered cross-linguistically.

Like locative inversion, directive inversion is undoubtedly a vestige of the V2 word order associated with earlier stages of the language.

Matrix wh-clauses have V2 word order, whereas embedded wh-clauses have (what amounts to) V3 word order.

Kashmiri, like German and Old English and unlike other Indo-Aryan languages, has V2 word order.

English has a SVO word order, but Dutch has this word order only partially having a V2 word order.

Wh-fronting in main clauses typically results in V2 word order in English, meaning the finite verb appears in second position, as marked by the 2-subscript in the b-sentences.

For example, the main verb must always be the second lexical unit of the sentence (this is a feature known as V2 word order, as is common to many Germanic languages).

Dutch exhibits subject-object-verb word order, but in main clauses the conjugated verb is moved into the second position in what is known as verb second or V2 word order.

German, Dutch and Frisian have SOV in subordinates, but V2 word order in main clauses, SVO word order being the most common.

In languages with V2 word order, such as German, inversion can occur as a consequence of the requirement that the verb appear as the second constituent in a declarative sentence.

Declarative main clauses as well as embedded object clauses in Kashmiri have V2 word order, but relative clauses have the VF order, e.g.

This makes Dutch word order almost identical to that of German, but often different from English, which has subject-verb-object word order and has since lost the V2 word order that existed in Old English.

Like most Germanic languages, Yiddish employs V2 word order: the second constituent of any clause must be the finite verb, regardless of whether the first constituent is the subject, an adverb, or some other topicalized element.

In these cases, inversion in English results in word order that is like the V2 word order of other Germanic languages (Danish, Dutch, Frisian, Icelandic, German, Norwegian, Swedish, Yiddish, etc.).

This would explain the later development of V2 word order as well, since it even forces verbs to precede their subjects if another word is placed first in the sentence, much like the way clitics separate prefixes from their attached words in Gothic.

The V2 word order of the other Germanic languages (other than English) does not allow one to acknowledge negative inversion as a specific phenomenon, since the V2 principle of those languages, which is mostly absent from English, allows inversion to occur much more broadly than in English.

However, most modern Germanic languages, including Dutch and German, have a more restrictive word order known as V2 word order, in which the finite verb, whether it is an auxiliary or not, is always placed second in main clauses (however not in Dutch and German subordinate clauses).