Suffiksien

Suffiksien, or suffixes, are morphemes attached to the end of a word to alter its meaning or grammatical function. They are a type of bound morpheme and are pervasive across the world’s languages. Suffixes typically fuse with a base form to form a new word or a new grammatical form, and they cannot stand as independent words.

Suffixes serve two main roles: derivational and inflectional. Derivational suffixes create new words or change word class, as in English -ness (brightness) or -ly (quickly). Inflectional suffixes indicate grammatical categories such as tense, number, case, or gender, as in English -s for plural or -ed for past tense, or in many languages’ case endings.

Suffix systems vary greatly. Some languages are highly agglutinative, stacking many suffixes to a single stem (as in Turkish or Finnish), while others are more fusional, with suffixes encoding multiple grammatical categories, often with vowel changes. Analytic languages rely less on inflection and more on function words, but all have some suffixation to some degree. In languages like Estonian or Finnish, a single word form can carry several layers of suffixes to express case, number, possessive, mood, and other relations.

Morphophonological alternations appear with suffixation; allomorphy can alter suffix shape depending on the preceding sound. Studying suffixes involves examining their productivity, distribution, and interaction with the stem.