In
morphological typology (in linguistics), an
isolating language (in fact the most extreme case of an analytic language) is any
language in which
words are composed of a single
morpheme. This is in contrast to a
synthetic language which can have words composed of multiple morphemes.
Explanation
Although historically languages were divided into three basic types (
isolating,
flectional,
agglutinative), these traditional morphological types are best divided into two distinct parameters:
- degree of fusion between morphemes
An isolating language can thus be defined as a language that has 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 has 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 has 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. Isolating languages use independent words while synthetic languages tend to use
affixes and internal modifications of
roots for the same purpose.
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 languages are especially common in Southeast Asia, and examples are
Vietnamese and
Chinese (especially
classical Chinese)
. Outside China, the majority of mainland
Southeast Asian languages are isolating languages with the exception of
Malay. Mainland Southeast Asia is home to many of eastern Asia's analytic language families including
Tibeto-Burman,
Kradai,
Hmong-Mien, and
Mon-Khmer. Even some
Austronesian languages in the region, such as
Cham, are more isolating than the rest of their respective family.
Burmese,
Thai,
Khmer,
Lao and
Vietnamese are all major isolating languages spoken in mainland southeast Asia.
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. For example,
Chinese makes use of word order to show subject–object relationships. Chinese (of all varieties) is perhaps the best-known analytic language. To illustrate:
As can be seen, comparing the Chinese sentence to the English translation, while English is fairly isolating, it contains a synthetic feature, in the use of the
bound morpheme -s (a suffix) to mark plurality. Note that "my" in the English translation is not composed of two morphemes, as may be wrongly supposed by comparing with the Chinese translation, but is a one morpheme word that conveys the same meaning as two one morpheme words in the Chinese translation.
Verb tense can also be implied with adverbs:
Similarly, in
Burmese, whose word order is subject-object-verb, sentence constructs are isolating.
1 Pronoun generally used for males
2 Literary form. Colloquial form uses .
Analytic languages
The term
analytic, referring to 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 of via morphology (with
bound morphemes). 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.
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. 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
