| Linguistic typology |
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| Morphological |
| Morphosyntactic |
| Word order |
| Lexicon |
A synthetic language is a language that is statistically characterized by a higher morpheme-to-word ratio. Rule-wise, a synthetic language is characterized by denoting syntactic relationship between the words via inflection and agglutination, dividing them into fusional or agglutinating subtypes of word synthesis. Further divisions include polysynthetic languages (most of them belonging to an agglutinative subtype, although Navajo and other Athabaskan languages are often classified as belonging to a fusional subtype) and oligosynthetic languages (only found in constructed languages). In contrast, rule-wise, the analytic languages rely more on auxiliary verbs and word order to denote syntactic relationship between the words.
Adding morphemes to a root word is used in inflection to convey a grammatical property of the word, such as denoting a subject or an object.[1] Combining two or more morphemes into one word is used in agglutinating languages, instead.[2] For example, the word fast, if inflectionally combined with er to form the word faster, remains an adjective, while the word teach derivatively combined with er to form the word teacher ceases to be a verb. Some linguists consider relational morphology to be a type of derivational morphology, which may complicate the classification.[3]