Morphological typology is a way of classifying the languages of the world (see
linguistic typology) that groups languages according to their common
morphological structures. The field organizes languages on the basis of how those languages form
words by combining
morphemes.
Analytic languages contain very little
inflection, instead relying on features like
word order and auxiliary words to convey meaning.
Synthetic languages, ones that are not analytic, are divided into two categories:
agglutinative and
fusional languages. Agglutinative languages rely primarily on discrete particles (
prefixes,
suffixes, and
infixes) for inflection, while fusional languages "fuse" inflectional categories together, often allowing one word ending to contain several categories, such that the original root can be difficult to extract. A further subcategory of agglutinative languages are
polysynthetic languages, which take
agglutination to a higher level by constructing entire sentences, including
nouns, as one word.