Language types as systems of essential features

In modern linguistics, the typological classification of languages is often perceived as purely structural, and language types are interpreted as arbitrary combinations of parameters at various levels. The article aims to identify the origins of a systematic approach to the typological classification of lan-- guages and show the promise of such an approach to explaining language types as deterministic, functional, and dynamic systems. For this purpose, interpretations of language type in structural con-- cepts and in systemic linguistics of W. Humboldt - I.A. Baudouin de Courtenay - G.P. Melnikov, who set the task of establishing the internal and exter-- nal conditionality of linguistic parameters of known language types. In systemic linguistics, the concepts of an ideal (standard) type and an individual type, which includes the specifics of a particular lan-- guage, were clearly distinguished, going back to the Humboldtian opposition between ideal and real grammar. Systemic linguistics has come to the conclusion that not only the units of language are systemically connected, but also the proper-- ties of these units, while both follow from the de-- terminant - the senior system-forming property. Along with a historical review of interpretations of the morphological type of language, the article examines those available in the works of G.P. Mel-- nikov's followers, the results of an analysis of the correlation of individual phonological and syntactic parameters with the morphological type, as well as prospects for further research on this problem.