The smallest unit of a language that carries meaning or grammatical function.
In precise terms
The minimal meaningful unit of grammatical analysis. Morphemes may be free (standing alone as words) or bound (affixes, clitics), and lexical or grammatical in content.
An example
evlerimizden
from our houses
What is going on here
Turkish 'evlerimizden' is ev-ler-imiz-den: house, plural, our, ablative. Four morphemes, one word. English needs four separate words for the same content. Neither language is more complex; they package the same information differently.
Why this matters when you are learning a language
Once you can segment words into morphemes, an agglutinative language stops looking like endless unmemorisable vocabulary and starts looking like a small set of pieces combined regularly.
Across languages
Isolating languages such as Mandarin approach one morpheme per word; agglutinative languages such as Turkish and Swahili stack many transparently; fusional languages such as Russian fuse several categories into one indivisible ending.
Related terms
- PhonemeAdvanced — A sound unit that can change one word into another in a given language.
- AllomorphAdvanced — One of the different shapes a single morpheme takes depending on its surroundings.
- InflectionAdvanced — Changing a word's form to fit its grammar, without making it a new word.
- DerivationAdvanced — Making a new word from an existing one — often changing its word class.
- Linguistic typologyAdvanced — Classifying languages by their structural features rather than their family history.
- ReduplicationAdvanced — A word-building pattern that copies all or part of a form to express a grammatical or lexical contrast.
- CliticAdvanced — A small grammatical form that cannot stand prosodically on its own and leans on a neighbouring word.
- PolysynthesisAdvanced — A label for language patterns in which one word—often a verb—can contain many meaningful and grammatical parts.
Where to go next
- Notation systems
- Language guides — See grammatical and lexical categories used in context.
- Terminology quiz — Test the terms on this page.