Typological linguistics

Typological linguistics is the study of and comparison between languages based on their structural features rather than their historical relationships. It categorizes languages by how they organize sounds, words, and sentence structures, such as whether they use prefixes or suffixes, or how they form questions. This approach helps linguists identify patterns and classify languages into types, revealing common strategies that different languages use to communicate, regardless of their origins. Essentially, it looks for similarities and differences in “building blocks” across languages to better understand human language as a whole.