Not to be confused with language isolate. A language isolate, in the absolute sense is a Natural language with no demonstrable genealogical (or "genetic" relationship with other living languages that is

In morphological typology (in linguistics), an isolating language (also analytic language) is any language in which words are composed of a single morpheme. Linguistic Typology is an international Peer-reviewed journal in the field of Linguistic typology, founded in 1997 Morphological typology is a way of classifying the languages of the world (see Linguistic typology) that groups languages according to their common morphological structures A synthetic language, in Linguistic typology, is a Language with a high Morpheme -per- word ratio Polysynthetic languages are highly Synthetic languages ie languages in which words are composed of many Morphemes Definition The degree of For fusion in Word formation, see Compound (linguistics. A fusional language (also called inflecting language) is a An agglutinative language is a Language that uses Agglutination extensively most Words are formed by joining Morphemes together Morphology is the field of Linguistics that studies the internal structure of words In Linguistics, morphosyntactic alignment is the system used to distinguish between the arguments of Transitive verbs and those of Intransitive A nominative-accusative Language (or simply accusative language) is one that marks the direct object of Transitive verbs distinguishing them An ergative-absolutive Language (or simply ergative language is a language that treats the argument (" subject " of an Intransitive Austronesian alignment, commonly known as the Philippine- or Austronesian -type voice system, is a typologically unusual Morphosyntactic alignment An active-stative language, or active language for short is one in which the sole argument of an Intransitive verb is sometimes marked in the same way A tripartite language, also called an ergative-accusative language, is one that treats the subject of an intransitive verb the subject of a transitive verb and the object A direct-inverse language is a language where clauses with transitive verbs can be expressed either using a direct or an inverse construction The syntactic pivot is the Verb argument around which sentences "revolve" in a given Language. In Generative grammar, (in particular Government and binding theory and the Standard Theory of Transformational Grammar a theta role or θ-role is the In Linguistics, word order typology refers to the study of the different ways in which languages arrange the constituents of their sentences relative to each other and the systematic In Linguistics, a VO language is a language in which the Verb typically comes before the object (thus including SVO, VOS and In Linguistic typology, subject-verb-object ( SVO) is a sentence structure where the subject comes first the Verb second and the object Verb Subject Object ( VSO) is a term in Linguistic typology. It represents one type of languages when classifying languages according to the sequence of these In Linguistic typology, Verb Object Subject or Verb Object Agent - commonly used in its abbreviated form VOS or VOA - represents the language-classification In Linguistics, an OV language is a language in which the object comes before the Verb. In Linguistic typology, Subject Object Verb (SOV is the type of languages in which the subject, object, and Verb of a sentence appear or usually Object Subject Verb (OSV or Object Agent Verb (OAV is one of the permutations of expression used in Linguistic typology. Object Verb Subject (OVS or Object Verb Agent (OVA is one of the Permutations of expression used in Linguistic typology, although it is rare among Time Manner Place (TMP describes one possible ordering of Adpositional phrases in sentences Place Manner Time is a term used in Linguistic typology to state the general order of Adpositional phrases in a language's sentences "to the store by car Morphology is the field of Linguistics that studies the internal structure of words Linguistic Typology is an international Peer-reviewed journal in the field of Linguistic typology, founded in 1997 A language is a dynamic set of visual auditory or tactile Symbols of Communication and the elements used to manipulate them In Morpheme-based morphology, a morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit that has semantic meaning. This is in contrast to a synthetic language which can have words composed of multiple morphemes. A synthetic language, in Linguistic typology, is a Language with a high Morpheme -per- word ratio

Explanation

Although historically languages were divided into three basic types (isolating, flectional, agglutinative), these traditional morphological types are best divided into two distinct parameters:

1. morpheme per word ratio
2. degree of fusion between morphemes

An isolating language can thus be defined as a language that a one-to-one correspondence between word and morpheme. To illustrate, the English word-form

boy

is a single word (namely boy) consisting of only a single morpheme (also boy). This word-form would then have a 1:1 morpheme-word ratio. The English word-form

antigovernment

is a single word-form consisting of three morphemes (namely, anti-, govern, -ment). This word-form would then have a 3:1 morpheme-word ratio.

Languages that are considered to be isolating have a tendency for all words to have a 1:1 morpheme-word ratio. Because of this tendency, these languages are said to "lack morphology" since every word would not have an internal compositional structure in terms of word pieces (i. e. morphemes) — thus they would also lack bound morphemes like affixes. An affix is a Morpheme that is attached to a stem to form a word Isolating languages use independent words while synthetic languages tend to use affixes and internal modifications of roots for the same purpose. An affix is a Morpheme that is attached to a stem to form a word The root is the primary lexical unit of a Word, which carries the most significant aspects of semantic content and cannot be reduced into smaller constituents

The morpheme-per-word ratio should be thought of as a scalar category ranging from low morpheme-per-word ratio (near 1. 0) on the isolating pole of the scale to a high morpheme-per-word ratio on the other pole. Languages with a tendency to have morpheme-per-word ratios greater than 1. 0 are termed synthetic. The flectional (or fusional) and agglutinative types of the traditional typology can then be considered subtypes of synthetic languages which are distinguished from each other according to the second degree-of-fusion parameter.

Isolating language are especially common in Southeast Asia, and examples are Vietnamese^[1][2], and classical Chinese (as distinct from modern Chinese languages)^[3]. Vietnamese ( tiếng Việt, or less commonly Việt ngữ) formerly known under French colonization as Annamese ( see Annam) Outside China, the majority of mainland Southeast Asian languages are isolating languages with the exception of Malay. The Malay language ( ISO 639-1 code MS is an Austronesian language spoken by the Malay people and people of other ethnic groups who reside in the Mainland Southeast Asia is home to much of eastern Asia's analytic language families including Tibeto-Burman, Tai-Kadai, Hmong-Mien and Mon-Khmer. The Tibeto-Burman family of languages (often considered a sub-group of the Sino-Tibetan Language family) is spoken in various central and south Asian countries including The Tai-Kadai languages, also known as Kadai, Kradai, or Kra-Dai languages and in China as Zhuang-Dong languages are a tonal The Hmong-Mien or Miao-Yao languages are a small Language family of southern China and Southeast Asia. The Mon-Khmer languages are the autochthonous Language family of Southeast Asia. Even some Austronesian languages in the region, such as Cham and the Hawaiian Language, are more isolating than the rest of their respective family. Cham is the language of the Cham people of Southeast Asia, and formerly the language of the kingdom of Champa in central Vietnam The Hawaiian language (Hawaiian ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i) is an Austronesian language that takes its name from Hawai'i, the largest island in the tropical Burmese, Thai, Khmer, Lao and Vietnamese are all major isolating languages spoken in mainland southeast Asia. The Burmese language (မြန်မာဘာသာ myà̃mà bàθà MLCTS: myanma bhasa) is the official Language of Burma. Thai (th ภาษาไทย, transcription: phasa thai, transliteration:; pʰāːsǎːtʰāj is the national and Khmer (ភាសាខ្មែរ or Cambodian, is the language of the Khmer people and the official language of Cambodia. Lao or Laotian (BGN/PCGN phasa lao IPA: pʰaːsaː laːw is a Tonal Language of the Tai-Kadai language family Vietnamese ( tiếng Việt, or less commonly Việt ngữ) formerly known under French colonization as Annamese ( see Annam)

Examples

Since words are not marked by morphology showing their role in the sentence, word order tends to carry a lot of importance in isolating languages. Morphology is the field of Linguistics that studies the internal structure of words For example, Chinese makes use of word order to show subject–object relationships. Spoken Chinese ( comprises many regional variants the largest of which are Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, and Min. Chinese (of all varieties) is perhaps the best-known analytic language. Spoken Chinese ( comprises many regional variants the largest of which are Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, and Min. To illustrate:

明天	我	的	朋友	會	爲	我	做	一	個	生日	蛋糕
明天	我	的	朋友	会	为	我	做	一	个	生日	蛋糕
míngtīan	wǒ	de	péngyou	huì	wèi	wǒ	zuò	yí	ge	shēngri	dàn'gāo
tomorrow	me	(subordinating particle)	friend	will	for	me	make	one	(classifier)	birthday	cake
"Tomorrow my friends will make a birthday cake for me. In Linguistics, the term particle is a word lacking a strict definition but has the function of changing the relation of the parts of the sentence to one another and is therefore In the modern Chinese languages measure words or classifiers ( Cantonese (Yale: leung4 chi4) are used along with numerals to define the quantity "

As can be seen, comparing the Chinese sentence to the English translation, while English is fairly isolating, it contains synthetic features, such as the bound morpheme -'s (a suffix) to mark possession. In Etymology, a bound morpheme is a Root morpheme that cannot stand alone as an independent word

zuò ("do") remains the same in the present tense:

"They are doing homework. "

他們	在	做	作業
他们	在	做	作业
tāmen	zài	zuò	zuòyè
they	are	doing	homework.

Analytic languages

The term analytic referring a morphological type is synonymous with the term isolating in most contexts. However, it is possible to define analytic as referring to the expression of syntactic information via separate grammatical words instead via morphology (with bound morphemes). In Linguistics, syntax (from Ancient Greek grc συν- syn-, "together" and grc τάξις táxis, "arrangement" is the Obviously, using separate words to express syntactic relationships would lead to a more isolating tendency while using inflectional morphology would lead to the language having a more synthetic tendency. In Grammar, inflection or inflexion is the way language handles grammatical relations and relational categories such as tense, mood, voice

By definition, all isolating languages would also be analytic (in the sense defined in this section). However, it is possible that a language may have virtually no inflectional morphology but have a larger number of derivational affixes. In Linguistics, derivation is "Used to form new words as with happi-ness and un-happy from happy, or determination from For example, Indonesian has only two inflectional affixes but about 25 derivational morphemes. Indonesian can be considered slightly synthetic (and thus not isolating) and, in terms of the expression of syntactic information, mostly analytic.

See also

• Auxiliary verb
• Free morpheme
• Linguistic typology
• Synthetic language
• Zero-marking language

References

• Sapir, Edward. (1921). Types of linguistic structure. In Language: An introduction to the study of speech (Chap. 6). (Online: www.bartleby.com/186/6.html).