A zero-marking language is one with no grammatical marks on the dependents or the modifiers or the heads or nuclei that show the relationship between different constituents of a phrase.
In many East and Southeast Asian languages, such as Thai and Chinese, the head verb and its dependents are not marked for any arguments or for the nouns' roles in the sentence.
Some languages, such as many dialects of Arabic, use a similar process, called juxtaposition, to indicate possessive relationships.
In Classical and Modern Standard Arabic, however, the second noun is in the genitive case, as in كتبُ مريمٍ kutub-u Maryam-a.
[citation needed] It has been suggested that verb-final languages may be likely to develop verb-medial order if marking on nouns is lost.