Isolating language

"Uninflected" redirects here. For the use in grammar, see Uninflected word.
Not to be confused with Language isolate.

Linguistic typology
Morphological
Morphosyntactic
Word order
Lexicon

An isolating language is a type of language with a morpheme per word ratio close to one, and with no inflectional morphology whatsoever. In the extreme case, each word contains a single morpheme. Examples of widely spoken isolating languages are Yoruba[1] in West Africa and Vietnamese[2][3] (especially its colloquial register) in Southeast Asia.

A closely related concept is that of an analytic 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 with synthetic languages, also called inflectional languages, where words often consist of multiple morphemes.[4] That linguistic classification is subdivided into the classifications fusional, agglutinative, and polysynthetic, which are based on how the morphemes are combined.[5]

  1. ^ "A Computerized Identification System for Verb Sorting and Arrangement in a Natural Language: Case Study of the Nigerian Yoruba Language" (PDF). eajournals.org. Retrieved 4 April 2023.
  2. ^ a b "Analytic language". Encyclopedia Britannica. 20 July 1998.
  3. ^ "Isolating Language". Glossary of Linguistic Terms. 3 December 2015. Retrieved 4 April 2023.
  4. ^ Whaley, Lindsay J. (1997). "Chapter 7: Morphemes". Introduction to Typology: The Unity and Diversity of Language. SAGE Publications, Inc. ISBN 9780803959620.
  5. ^ "Lecture No. 13". bucknell.edu. Retrieved 4 April 2023.