Preposition or postposition?

Do adpositions come before or after the noun phrase?

Languages line up two ways here. Verb-final languages put the adposition after the noun (postpositions): English *on the table* ↔ Japanese *tēburu no ue ni* — “table’s top at.” Verb-initial and SVO languages put it before (prepositions). The correlation is one of the most robust word-order universals in typology (Greenberg 1963; Dryer 1992) — but there are pointed exceptions. Mande languages (Bambara, Mandinka) are SOV but lean prepositional. Finnish and Hungarian are SVO-leaning but stay postpositional from their Uralic inheritance. A few languages use *inpositions* (the marker goes inside the NP — rare but attested), and a handful — Tagalog, classical Hawaiian — have such a thin adpositional inventory that the question barely applies.