For Writing Dialogue

If you want to give your characters a “foreign” feel to their language usage, here’s a schedule to explain how they would talk.

SOV (Japanese, Tamil, Turkish etc.)
SVO (Fula, Chinese, English etc.)
VSO (Arabic, Tongan, Welsh etc.) (chapter 4 page 1)

So Uncle Toban wouldn’t speak in a different word order than I would, or the book is written in. But perhaps the aide, when speaking to Dielli, would use a Verb Subject Object order.

LInguistics for Students of Asian and African Languages