ininflected

Ininflected is an adjective used in linguistics to describe a language, word, or form that exhibits little or no inflection—meaning it lacks morphologically marked grammatical categories such as case, number, gender, tense, aspect, mood, or comparison on its words. The term derives from the prefix in- (not) and inflectere (to bend). In typological discussions, ininflected forms are often contrasted with languages that rely heavily on affixes or internal changes to signal grammatical relationships.

Ininflection is commonly associated with analytic or isolating languages, which depend on word order and separate particles rather than bound morphemes to convey meaning. In such systems, grammatical relations are expressed through syntax and function words rather than through inflectional morphology. However, no natural language is completely ininflected; most languages show at least some inflection or allomorphic variation in certain words or categories.

Usage of the term tends to be contextual, describing particular tendencies within a language or contrasting a language with rich inflection against those with minimal morphology. It can also apply to specific word classes within a language that are unusually non-inflected, such as some pronouns or function words, even when the broader language has inflection elsewhere.

Limitations: the concept is idealized. The boundary between inflected and non-inflected forms can be blurry, and analyses may vary by theoretical framework. The term remains a useful shorthand in linguistic typology to illuminate differences in morphological strategy across languages.

See also: inflection, analytic language, isolating language, agglutinative language, fusional language.