Isolating Language - Explanation

Explanation

Although historically languages were divided into three basic types (isolating, flectional, agglutinative), these traditional morphological types can be 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 relationship between words and morphemes, 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. On average, words in English have a morpheme-to-word ratio substantially greater than one.

Similarly, in the synthetic language Russian, the word-form

malchik (мальчик), boy

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

antipravitelstvennyi (антиправительственный), anti government

is a single word-form consisting of six morphemes (namely, anti-/анти-, prav/прав ~ govern, verbal suffix -i/и, personal noun suffix -tel/-тель, noun action/state suffix -stv/-ств, adjectival suffix -enn/-енн, number and gender affix -yi/-ый), 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 China and Southeast Asia, where examples include Vietnamese. 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. The majority of mainland Southeast Asian languages are also 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.