Glossary of Linguistic Terms

Morphological Typology

Definition: 

Morphological typology is the categorization of a language according to the extent to which words in the language are clearly divisible into individual morphemes.

Discussion: 

Languages can be classified according to their degree of:

  • synthesis (the degree to which a language uses multimorphemic words), along a continuum from isolating to polysynthetic languages, and
  • fusion (the degree to which a language fuses multiple grammatical meanings into a single morpheme), along a continuum from fusional to agglutinative languages.
Source: 

Glossary Hierarchy