I'm not a native speaker of Swedish, so you might want to wait until you get this confirmed by a Swede but as far as I understand word order works like that: If the subject of the sentence comes first, the order sticks to the SVO rule as in: Han glömde kanske sitt paraply på tåget i går. (He forgot maybe his umbrella on the train yesterday [literally]) If another part of the sentence comes first, then there is an inversion meaning the verb comes before the subject. I går glömde han kanske sitt paraply på tåget. (Yesterday forgot he maybe his umbrella on the train [literally]) På tåget glömde han kanske sitt paraply i går. Sitt paraply glömde han kanske på tåget i går. Kanske glömde han sitt paraply på tåget i går. I hope that helps a little bit.