The constituent order (or “word order”) of Mordvin – Erzya and Moksha – has generally been described as quite free, but it has also been pointed out that the basic constituent order of these languages is SVO. In this article, this issue will be examined first in the light of literature and then in the light of parallel corpora. It seems that many factors can influence the constituent order, but there is also a variation in the order that seems random.