page_title: Morphological typology
section_title: In constructed languages
hierarchical_section_title: Morphological typology / In constructed languages
caption_attribution_description: La .lojban.: le na'e sezna'e aksioma English: the Principle of non-contradiction
context_page_description: Morphological typology is a way of classifying the languages of the world that groups languages according to their common morphological structures. The field organizes languages on the basis of how those languages form words by combining morphemes. Analytic languages contain very little inflection, instead relying on features like word order and auxiliary words to convey meaning. Synthetic languages, ones that are not analytic, are divided into two categories: agglutinative and fusional languages. Agglutinative languages rely primarily on discrete particles for inflection, while fusional languages "fuse" inflectional categories together, often allowing one word ending to contain several categories, such that the original root can be difficult to extract. A further subcategory of agglutinative languages are polysynthetic languages, which take agglutination to a higher level by constructing entire sentences, including nouns, as one word.
  Analytic, fusional, and agglutinative languages can all be found in many regions of the world. However, each category is dominant in some families and regions and essentially nonexistent in others.
context_section_description: Constructed languages (conlangs) take a variety of morphological alignments. Most universal auxiliary languages based on the Indo-European family take on the family's typical fusional alignment, such as Ido, Novial and Interlingua. A notable exception, however, is Volapük, which is strongly agglutinative. Another exception is Esperanto, which tends to be agglutinative as well. Zonal constructed languages such as Interslavic tend to follow the language families they are based on.
  Fictional languages vary: among J. R. R. Tolkien's languages for the Middle-earth universe, for example, Sindarin is fusional while Quenya is agglutinative. The language Newspeak from 1984 is a variant of English derived from the very concept of agglutination. Among engineered languages, Toki Pona is completely analytic, as it contains only a limited set of words with no inflections or compounds. Lojban is analytic to the extent that every gismu (basic word, not counting particles) involves pre-determined syntactical roles for every gismu coming after it in a clause, though it does involve agglutination of roots when forming calques. Ithkuil, on the other hand, contains both agglutination in its addition of affixes and extreme fusion in that these affixes often result from the fusion of numerous morphemes via ablaut.
caption: The rigidly defined, analytic words of Lojban make the language useful for describing logic – in this case, discrete mathematics.
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