Classifying languages by their structural features rather than their family history.
In precise terms
The comparative study of structural patterns across languages, seeking correlations and constraints. Typology is orthogonal to genealogy: unrelated languages can share a type, and related ones can diverge.
An example
Turkish, Japanese and Basque are all SOV.
What is going on here
None of the three is related to the others. Their shared word order is a typological fact, not evidence of common descent — a distinction that matters, because word order changes readily over time.
Why this matters when you are learning a language
Typology tells you what to expect from a language you have never studied. Learning that a language is head-final predicts its adposition type, its relative clauses and its subordination strategy at once.
Across languages
Morphological typology sorts languages as isolating, agglutinative, fusional or polysynthetic — a continuum rather than four boxes. Word-order typology sorts them by basic constituent order and correlated features.
Related terms
- Word orderIntermediate — The order in which subject, verb and object normally appear.
- MorphemeAdvanced — The smallest unit of a language that carries meaning or grammatical function.
- Morphosyntactic alignmentAdvanced — How a language groups the subject of an intransitive verb with either the subject or the object of a transitive one.
- MarkednessAdvanced — The idea that one member of a grammatical pair is the basic, default one and the other is the special case.
- Classifier (numeral classifier)Intermediate — A grammatical element used in counting constructions to mark a conventional class for the noun being counted.
- ReduplicationAdvanced — A word-building pattern that copies all or part of a form to express a grammatical or lexical contrast.
- PolysynthesisAdvanced — A label for language patterns in which one word—often a verb—can contain many meaningful and grammatical parts.
- Language varietyAdvanced — A neutral umbrella for a systematic form of language identified by who uses it, where or in what situation.
Where to go next
- Language guides — See grammatical and lexical categories used in context.
- Terminology quiz — Test the terms on this page.