Isolating language

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Isolating language

In morphological

Morphology (linguistics)

Linguistic typology

Linguistic typology is a subfield of linguistics that studies and classifies languages according to their structural features. Its aim is to describe and explain the structural diversity of the world's languages....
(in linguistics), an isolating language (also analytic language

Isolating language

In morphology Linguistic typology , an isolating 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....
) is any language

Language

A language is a form of symbol communication in which elements are combined to represents something other than themselves. Language can also refer to the use of such systems as a general phenomenon....
in which words are composed of a single morpheme

Morpheme

In morpheme-based morphology, a is the smallest linguistic unit that has semantics Meaning .In spoken language, morphemes are composed of phonemes , and in written language morphemes are composed of graphemes ....
. This is in contrast to a synthetic language

Synthetic language

A synthetic language, in linguistic typology, is a language with a high morpheme-per-word ratio. This linguistic classification is largely independent of morpheme-usage classifications , although there is a common tendency for agglutinative languages to exhibit synthetic properties....
which can have words composed of multiple morphemes.

>

An isolating language can thus be defined as a language that has a one-to-one correspondence between word and morpheme.

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In morphological

Morphology (linguistics)

Linguistic typology

Isolating language

Language

Morpheme

Synthetic language

Explanation

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

morpheme-per-word ratio
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 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. Isolating languages use independent words while synthetic languages tend to use affix

Affix

An affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word. Affixes may be derivation , like English -ness and pre-, or inflectional, like English plural -s and past tense -ed....
es and internal modifications of roots

Root (linguistics)

The root is the primary lexicology unit of a word, which carries the most significant aspects of semantics content and cannot be reduced into smaller constituents....
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

Vietnamese language

Vietnamese , formerly known under French colonization as Annamese , is the national language and official language language of Vietnam. It is the mother tongue of the Vietnamese people , who constitute 86% of Demographics of Vietnam, and of about three million overseas Vietnamese, most of whom live in the United States....
and classical Chinese

Classical Chinese

Classical Chinese or Literary Chinese is a traditional style of written Chinese based on the grammar and vocabulary of ancient Chinese, making it different from any Chinese spoken language....
(as distinct from modern Chinese languages). Outside China, the majority of mainland Southeast Asian languages are isolating languages with the exception of Malay

Malay language

The Malay language is an Austronesian languages spoken by the Malays and people of other ethnic groups who reside in Peninsular Malaysia, southern Thailand, Singapore, central eastern Sumatra, the Riau Islands and parts of the coast of Borneo....
. Mainland Southeast Asia is home to much 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

Cham language

Cham is the language of the Cham people of Southeast Asia, and formerly the language of the kingdom of Champa in central Vietnam. A member of the Malayo-Polynesian languages branch of the Austronesian languages family, it is spoken by 100,000 people in Vietnam and up to 220,000 people in Cambodia ....
, are more isolating than the rest of their respective family. Burmese

Burmese language

The Burmese language is the official language of Burma. Although the government officially recognizes the language as Myanmar in English, most continue to refer to the language as Burmese....
, Thai

Thai language

Thai , is the national language and official language language of Thailand and the mother tongue of the Thai people, Thailand's dominant ethnic group....
, Khmer

Khmer language

Khmer , or Cambodian, is the language of the Khmer people and the official language of Cambodia. It is the second most widely spoken Austro-Asiatic languages, with speakers in the tens of millions....
, Lao

Lao language

Lao or Laotian is a tonal language of the Kradai language family. It is the official language of Laos, and also spoken in the northeast of Thailand, where it is usually referred to as the Isan language....
and Vietnamese

Vietnamese language

Examples

Since words are not marked by morphology

Morphology (linguistics)

Morphology is the identification, analysis and description of structure of words . While words are generally accepted as being the smallest units of syntax, it is clear that in most languages, words can be related to other words by rules....
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:

??	?	?	??	?	?	?	?	?	?	??	??
??	?	?	??	?	?	?	?	?	?	??	??
míngtian	wo	de	péngyou	huì	wèi	wo	zuò	yí	ge	shengri	dàn'gao
tomorrow	I	(subordinating particle Grammatical particle A particle, in grammar, is a function word that is not assignable to any of the traditional grammatical word classes . The term is a catch-all term for a heterogeneous set of elements and lacks a precise universal definition.... )	friend		for	I	make	one	(classifier Chinese measure word In the modern Chinese languages, measure words or classifiers are used along with numerals to define the quantity of a given object or objects, or with "this"/"that" to identify specific objects.... )	birthday	cake
"Tomorrow my friends will make a birthday cake for me."

? (huì) is a stronger alternative to ? (jiang); both words mean "will". The proper translation in English should either be spoken with an emphasis on the word "will" or be changed to a stronger construct such as the going-to future

Going-to future

Going-to future is a term used to describe an English language sentence structure referring to the future tense, making use of the verb phrase to be going to....
.

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

Bound morpheme

In morphology , a bound morpheme is a morpheme that cannot stand alone as an independent word while carrying the lexical meaning related to the one in the word it is taken from....
-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.

Similarly, in Burmese

Burmese language

	1									2
ma ne' hpyan	??n?` kya no	y? ye.	???è?í~ tha nge chin:	mwéin?i mwei: nei.	kei? mo??~ kei' moun.	t? ta	bá~ ban:	p?o?? hpou'	péi pei:	myì myi
tomorrow	me	(subordinating particle)	friend	birthday	cake	one	(classifier Burmese numerical classifiers In Burmese language, measure words, in the form of particles, are used when counting or measuring nouns. They immediately follow the numerical quantification.... )	bake	give	(future tense particle)
"Tomorrow my friends will bake a birthday cake for me."

¹ Pronoun generally used for males

² Literary form. Colloquial form uses .

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

"They are doing homework."
??	?	?	??
??	?	?	??
tamen	zài	zuò	zuòyè
they	are	doing	homework.

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

Syntax

In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing Sentence s in natural languages. In addition to referring to the discipline, the term syntax is also used to refer directly to the rules and principles that govern the sentence structure of any individual language, as in "the Irish syntax"....
information via separate grammatical words instead of via morphology (with bound morpheme

Bound morpheme

In morphology , a bound morpheme is a morpheme that cannot stand alone as an independent word while carrying the lexical meaning related to the one in the word it is taken from....
s). 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

Derivation (linguistics)

In linguistics, derivation is "Used to form new words, as with happi-ness and un-happy from happy, or determination from determine....
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.

Isolating language

Explanation

Examples

Analytic languages

See also