Up to this point we have viewed the morphological systems of languages in an impressionistic way, looking at the combination of inflectional and derivational processes that give the language its overall morphological pattern. Morphologists continually seek to go beyond simple descriptions, however. In looking at the morphological systems of individual languages, we are always looking for patterns. We are interested in what sorts of morphological rules we might expect to find in languages and what that tells us about the general faculty of human language. We are also interested in classifying languages by looking at whether particular sorts of traits cluster together, and whether those clusters tell us something deeper about the nature of language. Here, we will look more closely at different ways we may classify the morphology of languages, and how various classifications illuminate the nature of language. This latter enterprise is called typology. We start this section by looking at a very traditional way of classifying languages, and then look at more contemporary schemes of morphological typology.