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An analytic language is any language where syntax and meaning are shaped more by use of particles and word order than by inflection. The opposite of an analytic language is a synthetic language. Image File history File links Broom_icon. ... Linguistic typology is the typology that classifies languages by their features. ... Morphological typology was developed by brothers Friedrich and August von Schlegel. ... An analytic language (or isolating language) is a language in which the vast majority of morphemes are free morphemes and considered to be full-fledged words. By contrast, in a synthetic language, a word is composed of agglutinated or fused morphemes that denote its syntactic meanings. ... A synthetic language, in linguistic typology, is a language with a high morpheme-per-word ratio. ... A fusional language (also called inflecting language) is a type of synthetic language, distinguished from agglutinative languages by its tendency to squish together many morphemes in a way which can be difficult to segment. ... It has been suggested that Agglutination be merged into this article or section. ... Polysynthetic languages are highly synthetic languages, i. ... Oligosynthetic (from the Greek ολίγοι, meaning few) is a hypothetical designation for a language using an extremely small array of morphemes, perhaps numbering only in the hundreds, which combine synthetically to form statements. ... Morphology is a subdiscipline of linguistics that studies word structure. ... In linguistics, morphosyntactic alignment is the system used to distinguish between the arguments of transitive verbs and intransitive verbs. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... An ergative-absolutive language (or simply ergative) is one that treats the agent of transitive verbs distinctly from the subject of intransitive verbs and the object of transitive verbs. ... An active language is one where the only argument of an intransitive verb (that is, the subject) is marked sometimes in the same way as the subject of a transitive verb, and some other times in the same way as the direct object of a transitive verb. ... A tripartite language is one that marks the agent, experiencer, and patient verb arguments each in different ways. ... A direct-inverse language is a language where clauses with transitive verbs can be expressed either using a direct or an inverse construction. ... The syntactic pivot is the verb argument around which sentences revolve, in a given language. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Thematic role. ... In linguistic typology, word order is the order in which words appear in sentences. ... In linguistics, a VO language is a language in which the verb typically comes before the object. ... In linguistic typology, subject-verb-object (SVO) is the sequence subject verb object in neutral expressions: Sam ate oranges. ... Verb Subject Object—commonly used in its abbreviated form VSO—is a term in linguistic typology. ... Verb Object Subject - commonly used in its abbreviated form VOS - is a term in Linguistic typology. ... In linguistics, an OV language is a language in which the object comes before the verb. ... In linguistic typology, Subject Object Verb (SOV) is the type of languages in which the subject, object, and verb of a sentence appear (usually) in that order. ... Object Subject Verb (OSV) is one of the permutations of expression used in Linguistic typology. ... Object Verb Subject (OVS) or Object Verb Agent (OVA) is one of the permutations of expression used in linguistic typology. ... Time Manner Place is a term used in linguistic typology to state the general order of adpositional phrases in a languages sentences: yesterday by car to the store. It is common among SOV languages. ... Place Manner Time is a term used in linguistic typology to state the general order of adpositional phrases in a languages sentences: to the store by car yesterday. It would seem that it is common among SVO languages. ... For other uses, see Syntax (disambiguation). ... In linguistics, the term particle is often employed as a useful catch-all lacking a strict definition. ... Inflection of the Spanish lexeme for cat, with blue representing the masculine gender, pink representing the feminine gender, grey representing the form used for mixed-gender, and green representing the plural number. ... A synthetic language, in linguistic typology, is a language with a high morpheme-per-word ratio. ...

A related, often-confused concept is that of an isolating language. An isolating language is any language where the vast majority of morphemes are free morphemes and are considered to be full-fledged "words". The degree of isolation is defined by the morphemes-per-word ratio. By contrast, in a synthetic language, words are composed of agglutinated or fused morphemes that denote their syntactic meanings. An analytic language (or isolating language) is a language in which the vast majority of morphemes are free morphemes and considered to be full-fledged words. By contrast, in a synthetic language, a word is composed of agglutinated or fused morphemes that denote its syntactic meanings. ... In morpheme-based morphology, a morpheme is the smallest lingual unit that carries a semantic interpretation. ... In linguistics, free morphemes are morphemes that can stand alone, unlike bound morphemes, which only occur as parts of words. ... For other uses, see Word (disambiguation). ... It has been suggested that Agglutination be merged into this article or section. ... A fusional language (also called inflecting language) is a type of synthetic language, distinguished from agglutinative languages by its tendency to squish together many morphemes in a way which can be difficult to segment. ... In linguistics, syntax is the study of the rules, or patterned relations, that govern the way the words in a sentence come together. ...

Features of analytic languages

Analytic languages often express abstract concepts using independent words, while synthetic languages tend to use adpositions, affixes and internal modifications of roots for the same purpose. In grammar, an adposition is an element that combines syntactically with a phrase and indicates how that phrase should be interpreted in the surrounding context. ... An affix is a morpheme that is attached to a base morpheme to form a word. ... The root is the primary lexical unit of a word, which carries the most significant aspects of semantic content and cannot be reduced into smaller constituents. ...

Analytic languages have stricter and more elaborate syntactic rules. Since words are not marked by morphology showing their role in the sentence, word order tends to carry a lot of importance; for example, Chinese and English make use of word order to show subject-object relationship. Chinese also uses word order to show definiteness (where English uses "the" and "a"), topic-comment relationships, the role of adverbs (whether they are descriptive or contrastive), and so on. For other uses, see Morphology. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... An article is a word that combines with a noun to indicate the type of reference being made by the noun. ... In linguistics, the topic (or theme) is the thing being predicated (talked about), and the comment (or rheme) is the thing being said about the topic. ... “Adverbs” redirects here. ...

Analytic languages tend to rely heavily on context and pragmatic considerations for the interpretation of sentences, since they don't specify as much as synthetic languages in terms of agreement and cross-reference between different parts of the sentence. In languages, agreement is a form of cross-reference between different parts of a sentence or phrase. ...

Chinese (of all varieties) is perhaps the best-known analytic language. To illustrate:

As can be seen, each syllable (or sometimes two) corresponds to a single concept; comparing the Chinese to the English translation, one sees that while English itself is still fairly isolating, it contains synthetic features, such as the bound morpheme -/s/ to mark either possession (in the form of a clitic) or number (in the form of a suffix). Further, note that the English verb is independently conjugated into a tense ("will make") indicating that the action will happen in the future. In contrast, the Chinese verb (zuò) is not inflected, and relies on other words to indicate tense (in this case the words míngtīan [tomorrow] and hui [will]). In linguistics, the term particle is often employed as a useful catch-all lacking a strict definition. ... In the Chinese languages, measure words or classifiers (Traditional Chinese: ; Simplified Chinese: ; pinyin: ; Cantonese (Yale): leung4 chi4) are used along with numerals to define the quantity of a given object or objects, or with this/that to identify specific objects. ... Bound morphemes can only occur when attached to root morphemes. ... In linguistics, a clitic is an element that has some of the properties of an independent word and some more typical of a bound morpheme. ... Look up affix in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

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

Outside of China, the majority of mainland Southeast Asian languages are analytic languages with the exception of Malay. Mainland Southeast Asia is home to much of eastern Asia's analytic language families including Tibeto-Burman, Tai-Kadai, Hmong-Mien and Mon-Khmer. Even some Malayo-Polynesian languages such as Cham are more analytic than the rest of their respective family. Burmese, Thai, Khmer, Lao and Vietnamese are all major analytic languages spoken in mainland southeast Asia. Location of Southeast Asia Southeast Asia is a subregion of Asia. ... Not to be confused with the Malayalam language, spoken in India. ... The Tibeto-Burman linguistic subfamily of the proposed Sino-Tibetan language family is spoken in various central and south Asian countries: Myanmar (Burmese language), Tibet (Tibetan language), northern Thailand (Mong language), Nepal, Bhutan, India (Himachal Pradesh, Uttaranchal, Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, Tripura and the Ladakh region of... The Tai-Kadai languages, also known simply as Kadai, are a language family found in Southeast Asia and southern China. ... The Hmong-Mien or Miao-Yao languages are a language family of southern China and Southeast Asia. ... The Mon-Khmer languages are the autochthonous languages of Indo-China. ... The Malayo-Polynesian languages are a subgroup of the Austronesian languages. ... Cham is the language of the Cham people of Southeast Asia. ... Note: This page or section contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. ...

When compared with a synthetic language, such as German, the contrast becomes clear: A synthetic language, in linguistic typology, is a language with a high morpheme-per-word ratio. ...

Note that the morpheme "der" corresponds to four separate concepts simultaneously, and the morpheme "die" refers to three concepts (German does not distinguish gender in the plural), but the rules relating "der" and "die" in this manner are quite arbitrary, making this set of morphemes fusional in nature. It is worth mentioning that both "der" and "die" can function as a feminine singular definite article, depending on the grammatical case. Furthermore, the word "Männer" corresponds to two concepts and relates to "Mann" through both the plural marker /-er/ and a process of umlaut that changes "a" to "ä" in many German plurals. Thus, the formation of German plurals is a simple, rule-governed inflectional pattern. In grammar, the case of a noun or pronoun indicates its grammatical function in a greater phrase or clause; such as the role of subject, of direct object, or of possessor. ... In linguistics, umlaut (from German um- around/the other way + Laut sound) is a process whereby a vowel is pronounced more like a vowel or semivowel in a following syllable. ... Inflection of the Spanish lexeme for cat, with blue representing the masculine gender, pink representing the feminine gender, grey representing the form used for mixed-gender, and green representing the plural number. ...

As a result, German can be said to lie between the agglutinative and fusional areas of the spectrum of linguistic typology. Linguistic typology is the typology that classifies languages by their features. ...

See also

• Auxiliary verb
• Free morpheme
• Linguistic typology
• Synthetic language
• Zero-marking language