Among languages with large numbers of speakers (let's say something like >5 million), what languages are the most synthetic? I can find Swahili and Turkish are good examples, but are there even more synthetic languages? Is there a way to quantify this? WALS doesn't have as many languages for its morphology categories as for others.
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2how would you go about quantifying this?– TristanCommented Mar 15, 2022 at 16:42
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Pretty much all Bantu languages are as synthetic as Swahili, if not more, and all Turkic languages are as synthetic as Turkish. The same might be said about Uralic languages, as well. Many of these languages have more than 5m speakers.– jlawlerCommented Mar 15, 2022 at 19:36
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1 Answer
I propose that it is Shona, which has 7 million speakers. It has a very productive verb morphology, where any verb root has on the order of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 inflected forms. The secret to their success is large a series of "modality" prefixes which are permutable.
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The mind boggles ... Do you have a source for this figure? Commented Mar 16, 2022 at 17:01