CapitalKiwi:
I've been basing my viewpoint on direct experience. Mostly South East Asian, [...]
The other thing is that most of them don't get ALL of the word order wrong. None of them, for instance, would say "Order Different Word in Languages"
I think it's widespread -- I won't say universal because I don't know -- that languages that don't mark case roles tend to have SVO order, e.g. English, Chinese, Malay/Indonesian. Not rigidly, as OVS is also very common in Malay, but in shifting between them you'd quickly work out that SVO was safe and neutral.
There are near-universals of word order, such as that VSO implies noun-adjective (Welsh, Arabic) but SOV implies adjective-noun (Turkish, Japanese), and so also for prepositions versus postpositions, standards of comparison, etc.
SVO, being in the middle, doesn't have such clear matches, e.g. French N-Adj vs English Adj-N.
