Active voice

Active voice is a grammatical voice prevalent in many of the world's languages. It is the default voice for clauses that feature a transitive verb in nominative–accusative languages, including English and most Indo-European languages. In these languages, a verb is typically in the active voice when the subject of the verb is the doer of the action.

In active voice, the subject of the sentence performs the action expressed by the main verb and is thus the agent. For example, in the sentence "The cat ate the fish", 'the cat' is the agent performing the action of eating.<ref name="O'Grady">O'Grady, William, John Archibald, Mark Aronoff, and Janie Rees-Miller (eds.) (2001). Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction Fourth edition. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's. Template:ISBN</ref> This contrasts with the passive voice, where the subject is the recipient of the action, such as in "The fish was eaten by the cat." The use of both active and passive voices in languages enhances versatility in sentence construction, allowing either the semantic agent or patient to assume the syntactic role of the subject.<ref name=Saeed>Saeed, John (1997). Semantics. Oxford: Blackwell. Template:ISBN</ref>

Even in sentences with impersonal verbs, where no agent is specified, the verb form remains active, such as "It rains."

Examples

Below are examples demonstrating the active and passive voices with pairs of sentences using the same transitive verb across various languages.

Language	Active voice	Passive voice
Afrikaans	Template:Interlinear	Template:Interlinear
English	The dog bit the postal carrier.	The postal carrier was bitten by the dog.
Dutch	Template:Interlinear	Template:Interlinear
Arabic	Template:Fs interlinear	Template:Fs interlinear
French	Template:Interlinear	Template:Interlinear
German	Template:Interlinear	Template:Interlinear
Italian	Template:Interlinear	Template:Interlinear
Latin	Template:Interlinear	Template:Interlinear
Korean	Template:Fs interlinear	Template:Fs interlinear
Japanese	Template:Fs interlinear	Template:Fs interlinear
Chinese	Template:Fs interlinear	Template:Fs interlinear
Slovak	Template:Interlinear	Template:Interlinear
Polish	Template:Interlinear	Template:Interlinear
Spanish	Template:Interlinear	Template:Interlinear
Swahili	Template:Interlinear	Template:Interlinear
Swedish	Template:Interlinear	Template:Interlinear
Telugu	Template:Fs interlinear	Template:Fs interlinear
Thai	Template:Fs interlinear	Template:Fs interlinear
Filipino	Template:Fs interlinear	Template:Fs interlinear
Cebuano	Template:Fs interlinear	Template:Fs interlinear
Ilocano	Template:Fs interlinear	Template:Fs interlinear

See also

• Anti-passive voice
• Mediopassive voice
• E-Prime, a version of the English language that excludes forms of the verb to be