The premise holds for most Romance languages but it is difficult to categorize Spanish (the largest latin language by number of speakers) as an SVO language. The earliest texts in medieval Spanish were all VSO and I, as a native Spanish speaker, tend to use VSO sentences slightly more often than SVO.

I will say "Ya ha llegado Jose a casa" (already has arrived Joe home) much more commonly than "Jose ya ha llegado a casa" (Joe already has arrived home) for example which sounds slightly clumsy.

Even when encapusaled within a subjunctive sentence (Quiero que venga Jose) the verb preceeds the object which sounds very alien to a French or Italian speaker for example - you would never say "Je veux que vienne Jose").

VSO sentences however are actually totally forbidden in Italian and French. They simply don't exist. French is the most strictly SVO language, followed by Italian. The least strict is Spanish where all sentence orders are allowed except OVS.

Why is this the case? Hard to say. Possibly Arabic influence on Spanish which has a similar flexibility between VSO and SVO. After all Castilian Spanish was partly built on the Mozarabic dialect of Kingdom of Toledo - a region where Christians were bilingual even for a good two centuries after its reconquest.

The premise holds for most Romance languages but it is difficult to categorize Spanish (the largest latin language by number of speakers) as an SVO language. The earliest texts in medieval Spanish were all VSO and I, as a native Spanish speaker, tend to use VSO sentences slightly more often than SVO.

I will say "Ya ha llegado Jose a casa" (already has arrived Joe home) much more commonly than "Jose ya ha llegado a casa" (Joe already has arrived home) for example which sounds slightly clumsy.

Even when encapusaled within a subjunctive sentence (Quiero que venga Jose) the verb preceeds the object which sounds very alien to a French or Italian speaker for example - you would never say "Je veux que vienne Jose").

VSO sentences however are actually totally forbidden in Italian and French. They simply don't exist. French is the most strictly SVO language, followed by Italian. The least strict is Spanish where all sentence orders are allowed except SOV.

Why is this the case? Hard to say. Possibly Arabic influence on Spanish which has a similar flexibility between VSO and SVO. After all Castilian Spanish was partly built on the Mozarabic dialect of Kingdom of Toledo - a region where Christians were bilingual even for a good two centuries after its reconquest.

The premise holds for most Romance languages but it is difficult to categorize Spanish (the largest latin language by number of speakers) as an SVO language. The earliest texts in medieval Spanish were all VSO and I, as a native Spanish speaker, tend to use VSO sentences slightly more often than SVO.

I will say "Ya ha llegado Jose a casa" (already has arrived Joe home) much more commonly than "Jose ya ha llegado a casa" (Joe already has arrived home) for example which sounds slightly clumsy.

Even when encapusaled within a subjunctive sentence (Quiero que venga Jose) the verb preceeds the object which sounds very alien to a French or Italian speaker for example - you would never say "Je veux que vienne Jose").

VSO sentences however are actually totally forbidden in Italian and French. They simply don't exist. French is the most strictly SVO language, followed by Italian. The least strict is Spanish where all verb orders are allowed except OVS.

Why is this the case? Hard to say. Possibly Arabic influence on Spanish which has a similar flexibility between VSO and SVO. After all Castilian Spanish was partly built on the Mozarabic dialect of Kingdom of Toledo - a region where Christians were bilingual even for a good two centuries after its reconquest.

The premise holds for most Romance languages but it is difficult to categorize Spanish (the largest latin language by number of speakers) as an SVO language. The earliest texts in medieval Spanish were all VSO and I, as a native Spanish speaker, tend to use VSO sentences slightly more often than SVO.

I will say "Ya ha llegado Jose a casa" (already has arrived Joe home) much more commonly than "Jose ya ha llegado a casa" (Joe already has arrived home) for example which sounds slightly clumsy.

Even when encapusaled within a subjunctive sentence (Quiero que venga Jose) the verb preceeds the object which sounds very alien to a French or Italian speaker for example - you would never say "Je veux que vienne Jose").

VSO sentences however are actually totally forbidden in Italian and French. They simply don't exist. French is the most strictly SVO language, followed by Italian. The least strict is Spanish where all sentence orders are allowed except OVS.

Why is this the case? Hard to say. Possibly Arabic influence on Spanish which has a similar flexibility between VSO and SVO. After all Castilian Spanish was partly built on the Mozarabic dialect of Kingdom of Toledo - a region where Christians were bilingual even for a good two centuries after its reconquest.