From WikipediaAnalytic LanguageAn analytic language is a language that conveys grammatical relationships without using A related concept is the isolating language, which is about a low number of morphemes per word, taking into account derivational morphemes as well. A purely isolating language would be analytic by necessity, lacking inflectional morphemes by definition. However, the reverse is not necessarily true: a language can have derivational morphemes while lacking inflectional morphemes. For example, Mandarin has many compound words,[1] giving it a moderately high ratio of morphemes per word, yet since it has almost no inflectional affixes at all to convey grammatical relationships it is a very analytic language.