   an isolating language is a type of language with a low morpheme-per-word ratio&nbsp;â in the extreme case of an isolating language, each word contains a single morpheme. a closely related concept is the analytic language, which in the extreme case does not use any inflections to indicate grammatical relationships (but which may still form compound words or may change the meanings of individual words with derivational morphemes, either of which processes gives more than one morpheme per word). isolating languages are in contrast to synthetic languages, where words often consist of multiple morphemes. that linguistic classification is subdivided into the classifications fusional, agglutinative, and polysynthetic, which are based on how the morphemes are combined. ==explanation== although historically languages were divided into three basic types (isolating, flectional, agglutinative), these traditional morphological types can be categorized by two distinct parameters: * morpheme-per-word ratio (how many morphemes there are per word) * degree of fusion between morphemes (how separable words' inflectional morphemes are according to units of meaning represented) a language can be said to be more isolating than another if its correspondence between word and number of morphemes approaches 1:1 more than the other one. to illustrate the relationship between words and morphemes, the english word "rice" is a single word consisting of one morpheme only (also "rice"). this word has a 1:1 morpheme-word ratio. the english word "handshakes", "hand-shake-s", on the other hand, is a single word consisting of three morphemes (namely, hand, shake, -s). this word has a 3:1 morpheme-word ratio. on average, words in english have a morpheme-to-word ratio substantially greater than one. if english were an isolating language, "handshakes" would have to be rendered as "shake of hand s", where each morpheme is a separate word. it is perfectly possible for a language to have one inflectional morpheme yet more than one unit of meaning. for example, the russian word vÃ­dyat/Ð²Ð¸Ð´ÑÑ 'they see' has a morpheme-per-word ratio of 2:1, having two morphemes: the root vid-/Ð²Ð¸Ð´-, and the inflectional morpheme -yat/-ÑÑ which inflects for four units of meaning (3rd person subject, plural subject, present/future tense, imperfective aspect). effectivel
Isolating_languages Linguistic_typology