Flektiivne

Flektiivne is the Estonian term for inflectional grammar, describing languages in which the form of a word changes to express grammatical relations and categories. In flektiivne languages, nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and verbs inflect; endings or internal modifications encode case, number, tense, mood, voice, person, and sometimes gender. Word order alone is often insufficient to determine grammatical meaning.

Inflectional morphology can be fusional, where a single affix encodes several categories, or more clearly agglutinative or mixed, where multiple affixes each express separate categories. Many languages show a combination of approaches, and some categories may be expressed by stem changes as well.

Examples: Estonian and other Finnic languages are highly inflectional, with nouns and adjectives inflecting for numerous cases and numbers, and verbs conjugating for tense, aspect, mood, voice, and person. In such systems, the same word form can carry complex information that would require several words in analytic languages.

Flektiivne is one aspect of linguistic typology. It contrasts with isolating or analytic languages, which rely more on word order and auxiliary words, and with strongly fusional languages that blend multiple grammatical meanings into affixes. In practice, many languages include varying degrees of inflection across parts of speech, producing a spectrum rather than a strict dichotomy.

Terminology: the adjective flektiivne (inflectional) and related nouns such as flektiivsus (inflection) are standard terms in Estonian linguistics for describing this morphological characteristic.