title_body: What is the difference between an Isolating and an Analytic language? These two terms appear to be used nearly interchangeably to refer to languages with little morphology. However at the same time I sometimes see them contrasted with each other, but cannot identify a pattern.
upvoted_answer: Isolating languages do not use inflectional morphology, i.e., using affixes or other manipulations of roots to create words--all words are seperate, and none contain multiple morphemes.  Vietnamese is an isolating language.
  
  Here's an example: the word snowman.  It has two morphemes: snow- and -man, and therefore has a morpheme-to-word ratio of 2:1.  Or take Spanish corremos, we run, which has three corr-, -e-, and -mos, for the word, present tense, and person/number.  (Please correct me if I am wrong--I don't know Spanish), so its ratio is 3:1.
  In an isolating language, this ratio approaches 1:1--words stand alone and cannot be separated (hence "isolating.")  So, these concepts--"snowman" and "we are running"--would take multiple words to express, as each one would contain only a single morpheme.  Isolating languages have no inflectional morphology and no derivational morphology.
  
  However, analytical languages are a broader category; they have a low morpheme-to-word ratio as well, but--and here's the big but--they can have a derivational morphology.  This means that while "we are running" would still be multiple single-morpheme words like in an isolating language, the word "snowman" could be a two-morpheme word.
  
  Thus, isolating languages are actually a subset of analytic languages.  Analytic languages cover languages with no inflectional morphology and a low morpheme-to-word ratio, while isolating languages have all that and no derivational morphology.