synthetic language
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language with a high morpheme-per-word ratio, as opposed to a low morpheme-per-word ratio in what is described as an analytic language
Wikidata facts
- Subclass of
- language
- Part of
- morphological typology
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- opposite of
- analytic language
- facet of
- morphological typology
- topic's main category
- Category:Synthetic languages
- Commons category
- Synthetic languages
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Encyclopedic overview
A synthetic language is a language that is characterized by denoting syntactic relationships between words via inflection or agglutination. Synthetic languages are statistically characterized by a higher morpheme-to-word ratio relative to analytic languages.
Fusional languages favor inflection and agglutinative languages favor agglutination. Further divisions include polysynthetic languages (most belonging to an agglutinative-polysynthetic subtype, although Navajo and other Athabaskan languages are often classified as belonging to a fusional subtype) and oligosynthetic languages (only found in constructed languages). In contrast, rule-wise, the analytic languages rely more on auxiliary verbs and word order to denote syntactic relationship between words.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “synthetic language” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.