(no subject)

[superslayer18.livejournal.com]

I have a question about Russian word order. I know what you can say anything in pretty much whatever order you want as long as you use the case system correctly. Russian can be SVO, OVS, OVS etc etc. My question is, which of these is the most commonly used one? I've heard SVO quite a lot, but I've also heard that people speak to English speakers in SVO sometimes because they know that that is what they are most used to, and that will be the best way to be understood. In books for learning Russian, or at least in the ones I have, they use SVO almost exclusively. I don't know if this is to help English speakers get used to Russian or if it is because that is what is actually used a lot.

To piggy-back on this question, are there differences of word order in dialects? For example, is it more common to use SVO in Moscow but SOV in St. Petersburg? What about through the passage of time? Maybe in the 1800s SOV was prevalent and then in the Soviet Union they started using VOS more... These are just made up examples, not anything I've actually heard.

Talk about a loaded question... Thanks in advance to anyone that can quench my curiosity!