Active voice is a grammatical voice common in many of the world's languages. It is the unmarked voice for clauses featuring a transitive verb in nominative–accusative languages, including English and most other Indo-European languages.
Active voice is used in a clause whose subject expresses the agent of the main verb. That is, the subject does the action designated by the verb.[1] A sentence whose agent is marked as grammatical subject is called an active sentence. In contrast, a sentence in which the subject has the role of patient or theme is called a passive sentence, and its verb is expressed in passive voice. Many languages have both an active and a passive voice; this allows for greater flexibility in sentence construction, as either the semantic agent or patient may take the syntactic role of subject.[2]
In the following examples the active and passive voice are illustrated with pairs of sentences using the same transitive verb.
| Language | Active voice | Passive voice |
|---|---|---|
| English | The hunter saw the deer. | The deer was seen by the hunter. |
| French | Brackett a écrit ce livre. (Brackett wrote this book.) | Ce livre a été écrit par Brackett. (This book was written by Brackett.) |
| Japanese | 犬がかんだ。 (A dog bit [someone].) | 犬にかまれた。 (By a dog [I] was bitten.) |
| German | Der Hund biss den Postboten. (The dog bit the postman.) | Der Postbote wurde vom Hund gebissen. (The postman was bitten by the dog.) |