Language typology

Morphology

You can read more about morphology here.

Morphological typology groups languages on the basis of how they form words by combining morphemes. The three morphological types are analytic, synthetic, and polysynthetic.

Analytic languages

In analytic languages, each morphemeis an independent word and words tend to be uninflected. Grammatical categories are indicated by word order or by bringing in additional words. Therefore, context and syntax are more important than morphology.

Analytic languages include some of the major East Asian languages, like Chinese, a Sino-Tibetan language of China, in all its varieties, but also Haitian Creole, an Indo-European language spoken in Haiti. Here is an example of a sentence in the latter:

Mariterenmen flè yo.

Marie past like flower plural

“Marie liked the flowers”

Some languages that are not considered analyticsharecertaintraitswith them, such as AfrikaansandEnglish, both Indo-European languages of South Africa and 59 countries, respectively.

Isolating languages

Isolating languages have no inflectional morphology, unlike analytic ones, which have little or no inflection. Their morpheme-to-word ratio is close to one, so that each word almost always contains a single morpheme. Examples of isolating languages are Igbo, an Atlantic-Congo language spoken in Nigeria, and Vietnamese, an Austroasiatic language of Vietnam.

Synthetic languages

In synthetic languages, a rootcombines with several morphemes to form a word. The morphemes may be distinguishable from the root or not, and may be fused with it or among themselves. Word order is less important than in analytic languages, and there tends to be a high degree of agreement between different parts of the sentence.

Most Indo-European languages are synthetic. According to whether morphemes are clearly differentiable, two kinds of synthetic languages can be distinguished: agglutinative and fusional.

Agglutinative languages

In an agglutinative language, morpheme boundariesareclearly identifiable, and each morpheme represents only one meaning. Sometimes a word can represent a complete sentence.

Hungarian, a Uralic language spoken in Hungary, and Korean, a Koreanic language of North and South Korea, are examples of agglutinative languages.

This is an extremely long word in Hungarian:

legeslegmegszentségteleníttethetetlenebbjeitekként

leges-leg-meg-szent-ség-telen-ít-tet-het-etlen-ebb-je-i-tek-ként

“like those of you that are the very least possible to get desecrated”

Words of such length are not used in practice and are difficult to understand even for natives.

Fusional languages

In a fusional language, morpheme boundariescannotbeclearly identifiedbecausebits of meaningarefused together into a single word or affix. Morphemes may also be expressed by toneand vowel gradation, also known as ablaut.

Two examples of fusional languages are Ona, a Choan language that used to be spoken in Argentina and Chile, and Tigrinya, an Afro-Asiatic language of Eritrea and Ethiopia. The former codes evidentiality and gender in a single suffix:

Ya ktįmi xįnn nįy ya.

Ya k-tįmi x-įnn nį-y ya.

1st person relativizer-land go-certainty.masculine present-masc. 1P.

“I go to my land”

Polysynthetic languages

In polysynthetic languages, a word is a complete sentence and morphemes may modify the meaning of the root. These languages have a very high morpheme-to-word ratio. They can also be agglutinative or fusional.

Most of the indigenous languages of the Americas are polysynthetic, including Inuktitut, an Eskimo-Aleut language spoken in Canada, and Tiwi, a language isolate of Australia.

For example, this is a word-sentence in Tiwi:

Pitiwuliyondjirrurlimpirrani.

Pi-ti-wuliyondji-rrurlimpirr-ani.

3Pplural-3singular.feminine-dead.wallaby-carry.on.shoulders-past.habitual

“They would carry the dead wallaby on their shoulders”

Parameters of variation

There are two other types of morphological variation:

• Prefix/suffix differences:Manyprefixesdonot change the category of the word they attach to (“do” and “undo” are both verbs), while most suffixesarecategorychanging (“do” is a verb and “doer” is a noun). The latter are more frequent.
• Pronoun-drop (pro-drop): In languages where verbal inflectional morphology indicates the personandnumberof the subject, the subjectis often omitted.