In this book, we have focused so far on formal processes of morphology that occur in many languages of the world; we have provided a sort of toolkit for forming new words from which languages can pick and choose. What we haven’t looked at yet is what we could call “the big picture”: how does word formation work overall in specific languages and how can the morphological systems of particular languages vary from one another? In other words, rather than looking at specific processes and how they work, we can look at how languages exploit different parts of our toolkit to constitute their own unique systems of morphology. We can try to characterize the morphological systems of languages according to the sorts of morphological processes that they exploit. We can compare languages to each other to see if characteristics of their morphological systems correlate in any way with other parts of their grammars, say their syntax or their phonology. And we can look at the distribution of morphological patterns in terms of genetic relationships (language families) or areal tendencies (where languages are spoken in the world). Studying language from this sort of global perspective is the subject of linguistic typology.