An isolating language is a type of language with a low morpheme-per-word ratio — in the extreme case of an isolating language words are composed of 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. This linguistic classification is subdivided into the classifications fusional, agglutinative, and polysynthetic, which are based on how the morphemes are combined.
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Although historically languages were divided into three basic types (isolating, flectional, agglutinative), these traditional morphological types can be divided into two distinct parameters:
An isolating language can thus be defined as a language that has a one-to-one correspondence between word and morpheme. To illustrate the relationship between words and morphemes, the English word-form
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
is a single word-form consisting of three morphemes (namely, anti-, govern, -ment). This word-form has a 3:1 morpheme-word ratio. On average, words in English have a morpheme-to-word ratio substantially greater than one.
Similarly, in the synthetic language Russian, the word-form
consists of a root word (namely mal-/маль- ~ small) and personal noun affix (namely -chik/-чик), with 2:1 morpheme-word ratio. The Russian word-form
is a single word-form consisting of six morphemes (namely, anti-/анти-, prav/прав ~ govern, personal verbal noun affix -itel/-тель, noun affix -stv/-ств, adjectival affix -en/-ен, number and gender affix -nyi/-ный), with 6:1 morpheme-word ratio.
Languages that are purely (or, relatively) isolating have a 1:1 (or, close to 1:1) morpheme-word ratio. In the pure case, these languages are said to "lack morphology" since no word has an internal compositional structure in terms of word pieces (i.e. morphemes) — thus they lack bound morphemes like affixes. Isolating languages use only independent words for grammatical purposes while synthetic languages often use affixes and internal modifications of roots for those purposes.
The morpheme-per-word ratio is 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. Languages with a morpheme-per-word ratio greater than 1.0 are termed synthetic. The "flectional" (or fusional) and agglutinative types of the traditional typology are considered subtypes of synthetic languages which are distinguished from each other according to the second parameter mentioned above, degree-of-fusion, which is based on the ratio of units of grammatical meaning per inflectional morpheme (agglutinative languages are 1:1, while fusional languages are greater than 1:1).
Analytic languages are especially common in Southeast Asia, and examples are Vietnamese[1][2] and Chinese. Modern Chinese has lost some of the synthetic features of Old Chinese, such as syllable modification (modern tonal alteration being a relic) for verbification and utilisation of the "s-" causative prefix found in many Sino-Tibetan languages.[3] 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, Tai–Kadai, 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.
This typological structure is also found in Africa. The Gbe languages, spoken in an area between eastern Ghana and western Nigeria, express many semantic features by lexical items. These languages have played a role in the genesis of several Caribbean creole languages, thus arguably forming a trans-Atlantic Sprachbund.
Since in isolating languages words are not subject to morphology, and in analytic languages they are not marked with morphology showing their role in the sentence, word order tends to carry much importance. For example, Chinese makes use of word order to show subject–object relationships. Mandarin Chinese (of all varieties) is perhaps the best-known analytic language. To illustrate:
| 明天 | 我 | 的 | 朋友 | 會 | 爲 | 我 | 做 | 一 | 個 | 生日 | 蛋糕 |
| 明天 | 我 | 的 | 朋友 | 会 | 为 | 我 | 做 | 一 | 个 | 生日 | 蛋糕 |
| míngtiān | wǒ | de | péngyou | huì | wèi | wǒ | zuò | yí | ge | shēngri | dàngāo |
| tomorrow | I | (genitive particle(='s)) | friend | will | for | I | make | one | (classifier) | birthday | cake |
| "Tomorrow my friends will make a birthday cake for me." | |||||||||||
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.
The two-syllable words in the Chinese sentence are actually two-morpheme words.
However, the definition of a "word" in Chinese does not exactly match its definition in English. Each morpheme in Chinese is one syllable, distinguished from the average of twelve homonyms (in the vocabulary of a well-educated person) by its own unique logogram. The meanings of the individual morphemes are never forgotten, so any multi-syllable word can be analyzed as a compound word.
Verb aspect can also be implied with adverbs:
| 他 | 們 | 在 | 做 | 作業 |
| 他 | 们 | 在 | 做 | 作业 |
| tā | men | zài | zuò | zuòyè |
| he | (plural) | (progressive aspect adverb) | do | homework. |
| "They are doing homework." | ||||
Similarly, in Burmese, whose word order is subject–object–verb, sentence constructs are isolating.
| မနက်ဖြန် | ကျွန်တော်1 | ၏2 | သူငယ်ချင်း | သည်3 | မွေးနေ့ | ကိတ်မုန့် | တစ် | ဗန်း | ဖုတ် | ပေး | မည်။3 |
| məneʔpʰyà̃ ma ne' hpyan |
tʃənɔ̀ kya no |
ḭ i. |
θəŋèdʒí̃ tha nge chin: |
θì thi |
mwéinḛi mwei: nei. |
keiʔ mo̰ʊ̃ kei' moun. |
tə ta |
bá̃ ban: |
pʰoʊʔ hpou' |
péi pei: |
myì myi |
| tomorrow | me | (subordinating particle) | friend | (subject particle) | birthday | cake | one | (classifier) | bake | give | (future tense particle) |
| "Tomorrow my friend will bake a birthday cake for me." | |||||||||||
An analytic language is a language that conveys grammatical relationships syntactically — that is, via the use of unbound morphemes, which are separate words, rather than via bound morphemes, which are inflectional prefixes, suffixes or infixes. If a language is isolating, with only a single morpheme per word, then by necessity it must convey grammatical relationships analytically.
However, the reverse is not always true: for example, Mandarin Chinese can be argued[4] to have many compound words, giving it a moderately high ratio of morphemes per word, yet since it does not use inflections to convey grammatical relationships it is an analytic language.
It is also 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. With only two inflectional affixes, Indonesian can be considered mostly analytic.
The term "analytic" is commonly used in a relative rather than an absolute sense. For example, English is less inflectional, and thus more nearly analytic, than most Indo-European languages. (For example, it uses "would go" whereas in Romance languages this would be expressed as a single inflected word; and it uses prepositions where most Slavic languages use declensional inflections). But English is also not totally analytic, because it does use inflections (for example, choose / chose / chosen / choosing); Mandarin Chinese has, e.g., "I go to store today.", "I go to store tomorrow.", "I go to store yesterday."