Examples of widely spoken isolating languages are Yoruba[1] in West Africa and Vietnamese[2][3] (especially its colloquial register) in Southeast Asia.
A closely related concept is that of an analytic language, which uses unbound morphemes or syntactical constructions to indicate grammatical relationships.
[5] Although historically, languages were divided into three basic types (isolating, inflectional, agglutinative), the traditional morphological types can be categorized by two distinct parameters: A language is said to be more isolating than another if it has a lower morpheme per word ratio.
Languages with a higher tendency toward isolation generally exhibit a morpheme-per-word ratio close to 1:1.
In an ideal isolating language, visible morphology would be entirely absent, as words would lack any internal structure in terms of smaller, meaningful units called morphemes.