Monosyllabic language

A monosyllabic language is a language in which words predominantly consist of a single syllable. The languages of China and Southeast Asia are sometimes referred to as monosyllabic languages. The languages of the region tend to be highly isolating and can be phonetically complex (the phonetic rules of Thai language permits 23 638 possible syllables, compared to, for example, Hawaiian language's 162). The difficulty of defining the term "word," such as the difficulty of telling apart collocations, set phrases and compound words in languages such as Chinese or English (is "dog house/doghouse" a single word or a two-word phrase?), the subjective question of what constitutes "most" words to make a language monosyllabic (there are no living languages that are strictly monosyllabic) and other such considerations render the topic non-scientific and unencyclopedic.