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Analytic language
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Analytic language

linguistics
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Analytic language, any language that uses specific grammatical words, or particles, rather than inflection (q.v.), to express syntactic relations within sentences. An analytic language is commonly identified with an isolating language (q.v.), since the two classes of language tend to coincide. Typical examples are Vietnamese and Classical Chinese, which are analytic and isolating. Analytic language is to be contrasted with synthetic language (q.v.).