Agglutinativa

Agglutinative languages form words by attaching a sequence of bound morphemes, or affixes, each typically expressing a single grammatical meaning such as tense, number, case, mood, or possession. The morphemes keep their identity and the boundaries between them are usually easy to identify, which makes the structure of a word relatively transparent. There is typically little phonological change to the affixes as they combine.

Words in agglutinative languages can become long as speakers add multiple affixes to a root. Suffixation is common, though prefixes and infixes also occur in some languages. The order of affixes is typically regular and productive, allowing the creation of new forms by combining existing morphemes. This yields a highly regular and learnable morphology, with each affix corresponding to a particular grammatical function.

Well-known agglutinative languages include Turkish, Finnish, Hungarian, Basque, Swahili, and Japanese; many other languages in the world show agglutinative tendencies. No language is purely agglutinative; most show a mix of morphological strategies to varying degrees.

Compared with fusional languages, in which affixes often fuse several grammatical categories into a single form, agglutinative morphemes tend to encode one category per morpheme. Isolating languages rely on minimal morphology, and polysynthetic languages build complex words that include multiple roots. Agglutinative morphology is a widespread feature across language families and is used in linguistic description and historical linguistics to classify and compare languages.