Stronginflected

Stronginflected is a term used in linguistic typology to describe languages in which grammatical meaning is encoded primarily through inflection rather than fixed word order or auxiliary words. It denotes a high density of inflectional morphology, with substantial variation across word classes and many productive affixes.

Core features include extensive case systems for nouns and pronouns; verb conjugations marking person, number, tense, mood, aspect, and voice; agreement between nouns, adjectives, and verbs; and frequent stem changes or vowel alternations. Morphological paradigms are often large, and affixes can be fused or layered, yielding rich grammatical signaling within a single word.

The concept is not a strict, universally standardized category; languages may be strongly inflected yet differ in how morphology interacts with syntax. Strong inflection can be fusional or agglutinative, and word order often remains relatively flexible because grammatical roles are signaled by morphology. In some languages, multiple affixes combine to convey nuanced information, reducing reliance on auxiliary verbs.

Examples commonly cited as strongly inflected include Latin, Sanskrit, Russian, Finnish, Hungarian, and Icelandic. Other languages with heavy inflection, such as Polish or Armenian, are frequently discussed in the same context. The label is used in linguistic descriptions and typology to emphasize morphological richness and its impact on syntax, alignment, and language processing.

In research and computational linguistics, stronginflected descriptions support morphology-aware parsing, lexical resources, and corpus annotation. See also inflection, inflected language, fusional language, and agglutinative language.