The world languages can be functionally categorized into two major systems: alphabetic (phonographic) language systems and ideographic language systems. Most languages belong to phonographic categories, including alphabetic languages, abjad languages, and abugida languages, while ideographic languages, such as Chinese, as well as ancient Mayan logosyllabic language, fall into a different category.

From a functional perspective, phonographic languages exhibit characteristics of synthetic languages, agglutinative languages, and analytic languages. In contrast, ideographic languages, particularly Chinese, share similarities with analytic language features and differ from phonographic languages. It is important and helpful to review the systems of synthetic languages, analytic languages, and agglutinative languages, as well as some isolated languages, in order to understand the fundamental properties of these languages.