1.4.3 The typological classification of languages

　 This is the other of the two main ways of classifying languages. It is based on a comparison of the formal similarities or differences which exist between languages. It is an attempt to group languages into structural types, on the basis of phonology, morphology and syntax.

　 Phonologically, languages can be grouped in terms of how they use speech sounds　---　how many and what kinds of vowels they have, whether they use tones, and so on. Chinese, for example, is a tone language, while English is not.

　 Morphologically, languages can be classified on the basis of the way words are constructed. Some European linguists in the 19th century recognized three main types: (a) analytic (isolating) languages, such as Chinese and Vietnamese; (b) synthetic (inflecting) languages, with Latin, Greek and Arabic as clear cases; (c) agglutinating languages, Turkish, Japanese and Swahili, for example. In type (a), there are no inflections, or formal changes；grammatical relationships are shown through word order. In type (b), grammatical relationships are expressed by changing the internal structure of the words, typically by changing the inflectional endings. In type (c), words are built out of a long sequence of units, with each unit expressing a particular grammatical meaning.

　 Syntactically, languages can also be classified by observing their word order in the sentence, that is, whether the word order is fixed or free and what kind of order is favored. The three basic elements of the sentence, the subject, the predicate (verb) and the object can be arranged in six different orders:

　(a) SVO

　(b) SOV

　(c) VSO

　(d) VOS

　(e) OVS

　(f) OSV

　 The most frequent word orders found in languages of the world are (a), (b), and (c), in which the subject precedes the object. It is observed that the order of other sentence components is most frequently correlated with the order of the three main components. If a language is basically a VO language, then the auxiliary verb tends to precede the verb; adverbs tend to follow the verb; and the language utilizes prepositions. English, as an example of SVO languages, exhibits all the three tendencies.

　 Although languages in the world are diversified, they are also remarkably similar in many ways. The similarities provide essential data for the study of universality of language. This will be shown in the following chapters.