Morphology studies the forms and formation of words in a language, with morphemes being the smallest unit of meaning. There are three main types of languages: polysynthetic, including fusional and agglutinative, and analytic. English is a fusion language. Morphology rules tend to be regular, and languages become less inflected over time. Affixes can be long and inserted in the middle of a word. Native speakers intuitively apply morphology rules to determine new word forms.
Morphology is a field of linguistics focused on the study of the forms and formation of words in a language. A morpheme is the smallest indivisible unit of a language that retains meaning. The rules of morphology within a language tend to be relatively regular, so that if you see the noun morpheme for the first time, for example, you can infer that it is probably related to the word morpheme.
There are three main types of languages when it comes to morphology: two of these are polysynthetic, meaning that words are made up of related morphemes. One type of polysynthetic language is a fusional or inflected language, where morphemes are compressed together and often changed drastically in the process. English is a good example of a fusion language. The other type of polysynthetic language is an agglutinative language, in which morphemes are linked but remain more or less unchanged – many Native American languages, as well as Swahili, Japanese, German and Hungarian demonstrate this. At the other end of the spectrum are analytic or isolating languages, where the vast majority of morphemes remain independent words – Mandarin being the best example of this.
This can be a confusing concept, so an example may be helpful. By looking at the morphology of English, which is not a particularly inflected language in its modern form, but retains a number of remnants, we could create the word frighteningly, which is made up of four morphemes: fright, which is a noun; en, which converts the noun into a verb; ing, which converts it into an adjective; and ly, which converts it into an adverb. Over time, languages tend to become less and less inflected, particularly when there is a lot of cross-cultural contact. In morphology, this is because languages become creolized as various pidgins used to communicate between disparate groups become natively spoken, and intercommunication in pidgins is facilitated by dropping inflections.
While you may be used to seeing certain forms in a specific context, such as conjugations at the end of a word, they can express themselves in many different ways. Aside from the English use of prefix and suffix, words can also be inflected by changing the sound of a vowel – called an umlaut – or by inserting an affix right in the middle of the word. Affixes can also be quite long, not just small snippets of sound: in Quechua, for example, there are a number of two-syllable affixes. While most people never formally study morphology, it’s something native speakers understand intuitively. Whenever a person learns a new word and immediately finds any number of forms for that word – past tense, plural, noun form – they are applying the rules of morphology unconsciously to determine what the new form should be.
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