Fleksje

Fleksje is a linguistic term for the modification of a word to encode grammatical information such as tense, number, case, gender, mood, person, or aspect. It is a central component of morphology and describes how words change form to fit their role in a sentence. The term stems from Latin flexio, meaning “a bending.”

In practice, fleksje appears through endings, internal changes, or, in some languages, through separate syllables. Nouns may take different forms to signal number or case (for example, in many languages the word for a person changes when it is the subject, the object, or possessive). Verbs commonly flex for tense, aspect, mood, voice, person, and number. Adjectives can change to express degree (positive, comparative, superlative). Some changes are regular and predictable, while others are irregular or suppletive, where entirely different word stems are used (for example, be: am/is/are in English, went/gone for go/went).

Languages vary in how flexed their words are. Some are fusional, combining multiple grammatical categories into single affixes; others are agglutinative, attaching several affixes in sequence; still others are more isolating, using little to no word-internal change. Ablaut or vowel alternations (sing, sang, sung) illustrate internal changes, while suppletion examples (good/better) show non-regular mappings between forms.

Fleksje is analyzed through paradigms that list all inflected forms of a word, and it plays a key role in dictionaries, language teaching, and natural language processing. It helps explain how meaning and grammatical relationships are conveyed without relying on word order alone.