Classical shape analysis methods use principal component analysis to reduce the dimensionality of shape spaces. The basic assumption behind these methods is that the subspace corresponding to the major modes of variation for a particular class of shapes is linearised. This may not necessarily be the case in practice. In this paper, we present a novel method for extraction of the intrinsic parameters of multiple shape classes in an unsupervised manner. The proposed method is based on learning the global structure of shape manifolds using diffusion maps. We demonstrate that the method is effective in separating the members of different shape classes after embedding them into a low-dimensional Euclidean space.