Word Order (STOMPI)

Text Breakdown

STOMPI is a key element to understanding and improving your Afrikaans. STOMPI is a template for word order in Afrikaans, if you follow its rules, you will never have trouble writing a speech again! So lets dive in.

STOMPI stands for parts of speech and types of words. Here is the acronym STOMPI in its complete form. As you can see, there are verbs after the subject and after the place. Let me take you through STOMPI and explain to you each letter. But first you must understand that each letter stands for a word in a sentence and the word in the sentence will go in the same place as the letter (between other parts of speech). The S stands for Subject. The subject is the person or thing doing the action in the sentence. For example, ons, ek and hulle can be subject words. You must remember that context is very important!

The next letter is the silent v which stands for verb 1. There is a simple principle in Afrikaans sentences, and this is, whatever the sentence starts with, the verb comes next. The first verb in afrikaans sentences can be any verb, but if there is an auxiliary verb such as het or sal in the sentence, they will usually be in the verb 1 position.

T is the next letter in STOMPI and it stands for time. Time words will be placed after the first verb. You can usually tell time words apart from other words by them mentioning a time of day, or a number that indicates hours or minutes. Examples of time words can be huur, middag and môre.

The fourth letter in STOMPI is O and it stands for object. An object in a sentence is a noun and something that an action can be done to. For example you can play on a SOCCER FIELD. Examples of objects can be rekenaar, tafel and pad. 

The next letter is M which stands for manner. Manner is the way in which the verb is done. You can think of them as adverbs. For example stadig can be a manner word. In a sentence it would say Die seun hardloop vandag stadig.

The P is next and it stands for place. This is a pretty straight forward one. Basically if anything is a place or location it goes in the position of the “p”. Examples of place words are in die bedkamer, huis or klaskamer.

The second verb comes next. This is where all of your “GEs” in past tense will go and where the second verb in future tense will go. The second verb can also be any regular verb as well.

The final part of stompie is the infinitive. This is very distinguishable because an infinitive is where you have om te in the second part. An infinitive looks a lot like a sentence - here is an example: om crieket te speel.

Let me now give you a sentence and we can then identify the different sections of STOMPI!

Campbell sal krieket op die veld speel.

It is important to note that not every sentence has to have every part of STOMPI.

We can now see that Campbell is the subject, sal is v1, krieket is the object, op die veld is the place and speel is v2!