An isolating language is a type of language with a morpheme per word 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, and defin ...

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 register) in Southeast Asia. A closely related concept is that of an

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 the ...

, which uses little or no inflection 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 Syntax, 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 ...

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

polysynthetic In linguistic typology, polysynthetic languages, formerly holophrastic languages, are highly synthetic languages, i.e. languages in which words are composed of many morphemes (word parts that have independent meaning but may or may not be able to ...

, 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 subject, plural subject, present/future tense, indicative mood). 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 (the elementary unit of morphosyntax) that can appear only as part of a larger expression; a free morpheme (or unbound morpheme) is one that can stand alone. A bound morpheme is a type of bound form, ...

s like affixes. 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