The Importance of Topic Marking in Languages

There's an entire typological category of language that's called a topic comment language, where they do topic fronting so often that they needed a special name for it. In Japanese, by default, subjects are marked as topic because subjects in topic are very closely related cross linguistically. If the subject is the focus, then you get a special subject marker next to the subject and you don't get any of those non topic markers anywhere else in the sentence. And oh, one super neat: One of those two West or East African languages that have clicks surrounded by a Bontu has a really, really weird system Where everything that isn't a verb gets a we're in the focus domain