Classifying languages

Linguists have informally classified languages on the basis of their morphological structure:

• Isolating languages (e.g. Chinese) have no bound morphemes.

• Agglutinating languages (e.g. Turkish) have words built from morphemes with a single meaning or grammatical function.

• Inflecting languages (e.g. Russian) use bound morphemes to mark several grammatical categories.

• Polysynthetic languages (e.g. Inuit) build ‘sentence-words’ out of bound morphemes rather than constructing sentences from free ones, as for example in English.

As with the analytic/synthetic distinction, differences between languages are relative rather than absolute, and languages may combine elements of more than category.