Synthetic language

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. Two divisions are fusional languages which favor inflection and agglutinative languages which 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. Adding morphemes to a root word is used in inflection to convey a grammatical property of the word, such as denoting a subject or an object. Combining two or more morphemes into one word is used in agglutinating languages, instead. For example, the word fast, if inflectionally combined with -er to form the word faster, remains an adjective, while the word teach derivatively combined with -er to form the word teacher ceases to be a verb. Some linguists consider relational morphology to be a type of derivational morphology, which may complicate the classification.