In linguistics, free morphemes (sometimes also referred to as unbound morphemes) are morphemes that can stand alone, unlike bound morphemes, which occur only as parts of words. Linguistics is the scientific study of Language, encompassing a number of sub-fields In Morpheme-based morphology, a morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit that has semantic meaning. In Etymology, a bound morpheme is a Root morpheme that cannot stand alone as an independent word In the English sentence colourless green ideas sleep furiously, for example, colour, green, idea, and sleep are all free morphemes, whereas -less, -s and -ly are all bound morphemes. English is a West Germanic language originating in England and is the First language for most people in the United Kingdom, the United States " Colorless green ideas sleep furiously " is a sentence composed by Noam Chomsky in 1957 as an example of a sentence whose Grammar is correct
Many languages of East Asia have free morphemes, but not bound ones, such as the Chinese languages, the Tai languages, and Vietnamese. The Tai languages (ภาษาไต are a subgroup of the Tai-Kadai Language family.