An isolating language is a type of language with a

morpheme A morpheme is the smallest meaningful constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. In English, morphemes are often but not necessarily words. Morphemes that stand alone ar ...

per

word A word is a basic element of language that carries an objective or practical meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of what a word is, there is no consen ...

ratio close to one, and with no

inflectional In linguistic morphology, inflection (or inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, an ...

morphology whatsoever. In the extreme case, each word contains a single morpheme. Examples of widely spoken isolating languages are Igbo in West Africa and Vietnamese (especially its

colloquial Colloquialism (), also called colloquial language, everyday language or general parlance, is the linguistic style used for casual (informal) communication. It is the most common functional style of speech, the idiom normally employed in convers ...

analytic language In linguistic typology, an analytic language is a language that conveys relationships between words in sentences primarily by way of ''helper'' words ( particles, prepositions, etc.) and word order, as opposed to using inflections (changing th ...

, which uses little or no

inflection In linguistic morphology, inflection (or inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and ...

to indicate grammatical relationships. Isolating and analytic languages tend to coincide and are often identified. However, analytic languages such as English may still contain polymorphemic words in part because of the presence of derivational morphemes. Isolating languages contrast with

synthetic language A synthetic language uses inflection or agglutination to express syntactic relationships within a sentence. Inflection is the addition of morphemes to a root word that assigns grammatical property to that word, while agglutination is the combi ...

s, where words often consist of multiple morphemes. That linguistic classification is subdivided into the classifications fusional,

agglutinative In linguistics, agglutination is a morphological process in which words are formed by stringing together morphemes, each of which corresponds to a single syntactic feature. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglutinative lang ...

, and polysynthetic, which are based on how the morphemes are combined.

Explanation

Although historically languages were divided into three basic types (''isolating'', ''inflectional'', ''agglutinative''), the traditional morphological types can be categorized by two distinct parameters: * morpheme per word ratio (how many morphemes there are per word) * degree of fusion between morphemes (how separable words' inflectional morphemes are according to units of meaning represented) A language is said to be more isolating than another if it has a lower morpheme per word ratio. To illustrate the relationship between words and morphemes, the English term "rice" is a single word consisting of only one morpheme (''rice''). This word has a 1:1 morpheme per word ratio. In contrast, "handshakes" is a single word consisting of three morphemes (''hand'', ''shake'', ''-s''). This word has a 3:1 morpheme per word ratio. On average, words in English have a morpheme per word ratio substantially greater than one. It is perfectly possible for a language to have one inflectional morpheme yet more than one unit of meaning. For example, the Russian word ''vídyat''/видят 'they see' has a morpheme per word ratio of 2:1, having two morphemes: the root ''vid-''/вид-, which conveys the imperfective aspect meaning, and the inflectional morpheme ''-yat''/-ят which inflects for four units of meaning (3rd

person A person (plural, : people) is a being that has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations such as kinship, ownership of pr ...

subject,

plural The plural (sometimes list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated pl., pl, or ), in many languages, is one of the values of the grammatical number, grammatical category of number. The plural of a noun typically denotes a quantity greater than the ...

subject, present/future tense, indicative

mood Mood may refer to: *Mood (psychology), a relatively long lasting emotional state Music *The Mood, a British pop band from 1981 to 1984 * Mood (band), hip hop artists * ''Mood'' (Jacquees album), 2016 * ''Moods'' (Barbara Mandrell album), 1978 ...

). Effectively, it has four units of meaning in one inseparable morpheme: ''-yat''/-ят. Languages that are relatively more isolating have a morpheme per word ratio that approaches 1:1. A purely-isolating language would lack any visible morphology since no word would have an internal compositional structure in terms of word pieces (i.e. morphemes) and so it would lack

bound morpheme In linguistics, a bound morpheme is a morpheme A morpheme is the smallest meaningful constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. In English, morphemes are often but not ...

s like

affixes In linguistics, an affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word or word form. Affixes may be derivational, like English ''-ness'' and ''pre-'', or inflectional, like English plural ''-s'' and past tense ''-ed''. They ...

. The morpheme per word ratio is a scalar category ranging from low ratios (approaching 1:1) on the isolating hypothetical pole of the scale, to a high morpheme per word ratio. The greater the overall ratio, the less isolating and the more synthetic the language.

Explanation

See also

References

Further reading