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Morphological typology is a classification of languages (see linguistic typology) that attempts to classify the languages of the world according to their common morphological structures. First developed by brothers Friedrich von Schlegel and August von Schlegel, the field groups languages on the basis of how those languages form words by combining morphemes. Two primary categories exist to distinguish all languages: analytic languages and synthetic languages, where each term refers to the opposite end of a continuous scale. Along such a scale the categories are further refined according to something...

Analytic languages

Analytic languages show a low ratio of words to morphems; in fact, the correspondence is nearly one-to-one. In such languages sentences are composed of indepedent root morphemes. Grammatical relations that hold between words are expressed by separate words where otherwise they might be expressed by affixes, which are present to the most minimal degree in such languages. There is little to no morphological change in words: they tend not to be inflected. Grammatical categories are indicated by word order (for example, inversion of verb and subject for interrogative sentences) or by bringing in additional words (for example, a word for "some" or "many" instead of a plural inflection like English -s). Individual words carry a general meaning (root concept); nuances are expressed by other words. Finally, in analytic languages context and syntax are more important than morphology.

Analytic languages include some of the major East Asian languages, such as Chinese, and Vietnamese. Also, English is moderately analytic (probably one of the most analytic of Indo-European languages).

Synthetic languages

Synthetic languages form words by affixing a given number of dependent morphemes to a root morpheme. The morphemes may be distinguishable from the root, or they may not; they might be fused with it or among themselves, and they can also be realized as stress, pitch or tone shifts, or regular phonetic changes. Word order is less important for these languages than it is for analytic languages, since individual words express the grammatical relations that would otherwise be indicated through syntactic considerations. In addition, there tends to be a high degree of concordance (agreement, cross-reference between different parts of the sentence). Therefore, morphology in synthetic languages is more important than syntax.

Most Indo-European languages are moderately synthetic.

There are two subtypes of synthesis, according to whether morphemes are clearly differentiable or not. These subtypes are agglutinative and fusional (or inflectional or flectional in older terminology).

Agglutinative languages

Agglutinative languages have words containing several morphemes that are always clearly differentiable from each other in that each morpheme represents only one grammatical meaning and the boundaries between those morphemes are easily demarcated; that is, the bound morphemes are affixes, and they can be individually identified. Agglutinative languages tend to have a high number of morphemes per word, and their morphology is highly regular.

Agglutinative languages include Korean, Turkish and Japanese.

Fusional languages

In fusional languages, morphemes are not always readily distinguishable from the root or among themselves. Several morphemes may be fused into one affix, and affixes may interact and fuse in turn. Morphemes may also be expressed by changes in stress, pitch or tone, which are of course inseparable from the root, or by internal phonetic changes in the root (such as vowel gradation or Ablaut).

Most Indo-European languages are fusional to different degrees.

Polysynthetic languages

In 1836, Wilhelm von Humboldt proposed a third category, which he called polysynthetic languages. (The term polysynthesis was first used in linguistics by Peter Stephen Duponceau who borrowed it from chemistry). These languages have a high morpheme-to-word ratio. Note that no clear division exists between synthetic languages and polysynthetic languages; the place of one language largely depends on its relation to other languages diplaying similar characteristics on the same scale.

Among common features of polysynthetic languages there are:

A highly regular morphology
A tendency for verb forms to include morphemes that refer to several arguments besides the subject (polypersonalism).

Another feature of polysynthetic languages is commonly expressed as "the ability to form words that are equivalent to whole sentences in other languages". Of course, this is rather useless as a defining feature, since it is tautological ("other languages" can only be defined by opposition to polysynthetic ones, and viceversa).

Many Amerindian languages are polysynthetic. Inuktitut is one example, and one specific example is the phrase: tavvakiqutiqarpiit which roughly translates to "Do you have any tobacco for sale?".

Morphological typology in reality

Each of the types above are idealizations; they do not exist in a pure state in reality. All languages are of mixed types, though they generally fit best into one category. English is synthetic, but it is more analytic than Spanish, and much more analytic than Latin. Chinese is the usual model of analytic languages, but it does have some bound morphemes. Japanese is highly synthetic (agglutinative) in its verbs, but clearly analytic in its nouns. The scale above is continuous and relative, not absolute. It is difficult to classify a language as absolutely analytic or synthetic, however a language could be described as more synthetic than Chinese but less synthetic than Korean.