Agglutinoiva

Agglutinoiva is the Finnish term for the linguistic category known in English as agglutinative languages. These are languages in which words are formed by stringing together a linear sequence of morphemes, each carrying a single grammatical meaning such as tense, number, case, or mood. The base stem remains relatively stable, and affixes are attached in a transparent, modular way.

Morphemes in agglutinative languages are typically bound and easily segmentable, allowing relatively straightforward morphological analysis. The morphology tends to be additive: each affix generally encodes one function, though some phonological adjustments, like vowel harmony, can occur.

Common examples include Finnish, Turkish, Hungarian, Basque, Swahili, and Tamil. Finnish and Turkish are frequently cited as paradigmatic: Finnish uses extensive suffixation to mark case, possession, and verb forms; Turkish employs long chains of suffixes to indicate tense, aspect, mood, person, and definiteness. Hungarian, Basque, Swahili, and Tamil also display prominent agglutination, though each language shows its own variation and degree of fusion in places.

Agglutinative languages are contrasted with fusional languages, where a single affix may encode multiple grammatical categories, and with isolating languages, which rely less on morphology. In practice, many languages exhibit mixed features along a continuum between these categories.

The term derives from agglutination, the metaphor of “gluing” morphemes to a stem, and has been widely used in linguistic typology since the 19th and 20th centuries.