| Linguistic typology |
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| Morphological |
| Morphosyntactic |
| Word order |
| Lexicon |
Anisolating language is atype of language with amorpheme perword ratio close to one, and with noinflectionalmorphology whatsoever. In the extreme case, each word contains a single morpheme. Examples of widely spoken isolating languages areYoruba[1] in West Africa andVietnamese[2][3] (especially itscolloquialregister) in Southeast Asia.
A closely related concept is that of ananalytic language, which uses unbound morphemes or syntactical constructions to indicate grammatical relationships. Isolating and analytic languages tend to overlap in linguistic scholarship.[2]
Isolating languages contrast withsynthetic languages, also calledinflectional languages, where words often consist of multiple morphemes.[4] Synthetic languages are subdivided into the classificationsfusional,agglutinative, andpolysynthetic, which are based on how the morphemes are combined.[5]
Although historically, languages were divided into three basic types (isolating,inflectional,agglutinative), the traditional morphological types can be categorized by two distinct parameters:
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 "city" is a single word, consisting of only one morpheme (city). 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, theRussian wordvídyat/видят "they see" has a morpheme per word ratio of 2:1 since it has two morphemes. The rootvid-/вид- conveys the imperfectiveaspect meaning, and the inflectional morpheme-yat/-ят inflects for four units of meaning (third-person subject,plural subject, present/futuretense, indicativemood). Effectively, it has four units of meaning in one inseparable morpheme:-yat/-ят.
Languages with a higher tendency toward isolation generally exhibit a morpheme-per-word ratio close to 1:1. In an ideal isolating language, visible morphology would be entirely absent, as words would lack any internal structure in terms of smaller, meaningful units called morphemes. Such a language would not usebound morphemes likeaffixes.
The morpheme-to-word ratio operates on a spectrum, ranging from lower ratios that skew toward the isolating end to higher ratios on the synthetic end of the scale. A larger overall ratio suggests that a language leans more toward being synthetic rather than isolating.[6][7]
Some isolating languages include:
