An 'isolating language' is any
language where the vast majority of
morphemes are
free morphemes and are considered to be full-fledged "
words," rather than
particles that are
agglutinated. The degree of isolation is defined by the
morphemes-per-word ratio. By contrast, in a
synthetic language, words are composed of agglutinated or fused morphemes that denote their syntactic meanings.
Not to be confused with
analytic languages.