Inflectionheavy

Inflectionheavy is a descriptive label used in linguistics to refer to languages or varieties in which grammatical meaning is predominantly carried by inflectional morphology rather than by separate words or fixed word order.

In Inflectionheavy languages, nouns, adjectives, and pronouns typically inflect for case, number, and gender; verbs inflect for person, number, tense, aspect, mood, voice, and sometimes evidentiality; agreement is common between nouns and modifiers, and between subjects and verbs.

Inflection in these languages is often synthetic or fusional, with bound morphemes that may encode multiple grammatical categories. Some languages show highly productive inflection across many categories, while others have long paradigms for a few core forms. Because much information is encoded in morphology, word order can be relatively free compared with analytic languages, though conventional orders are still used for emphasis and clarity.

Inflectionheavy contrasts with analytic (periphrastic) languages, where grammatical relations are expressed through function words and strict word order. It also relates to morphological typology, where languages are described along a continuum from isolating to fusional to agglutinative. The term Inflectionheavy is not a formal typological category in major grammars but is commonly used as a practical label in descriptions of languages with rich inflectional paradigms.

Representative examples often cited include Latin and Ancient Greek for noun and verb inflection; Russian, German, and Sanskrit for extensive case and verb morphology; Finnish and Hungarian for large nominal or verbal paradigms; Arabic uses templatic morphology for verb inflection. Some modern languages combine heavy inflection with analytic tendencies.