Plural words

A minority of the languages of the world express plurality by means of plural words, separate words which modify nouns but which serve the same grammatical function as plural affixes in other languages. A few languages have singular or dual words as well. The grammatical category of these plural words varies: in some languages they form a category by themselves, while in other languages they are articles or numerals. These plural words tend to precede the noun in VO languages, and to follow in OV languages, the opposite from what some work on word order correlations might lead one to expect. They are particulary common in southeast Asia and Australasia.