agglutinaatio

Agglutination, known as agglutinaatio in Finnish, is a morphological process and a typological category in linguistics. In agglutinative languages, words are formed by stringing together relatively discrete morphemes, each carrying a single grammatical meaning. The result is a chain of affixes attached to a base stem, with clear boundaries between morphemes.

Affixes attach in a linear sequence, often as suffixes, though prefixes or infixes can occur in some languages. Each affix typically expresses one grammatical category, such as case, number, person, tense, aspect, mood, possession, or negation. The order of affixes is usually predictable and regular, aiding transparent parsing of word structure.

Commonly cited agglutinative languages include Finnish, Hungarian, Turkish, Basque, and Swahili. For example, Finnish demonstrates agglutination in talossani, meaning “in my house,” formed from talo (house) + ssa (in) + ni (my). Turkish provides a long chain such as evlerimizden, meaning “from our houses,” built from ev (house) + ler (plural) + imiz (our) + den (from).

Agglutination is often contrasted with fusional morphology, where a single affix may encode multiple grammatical categories and morpheme boundaries can blur, and with isolating languages, which use little morphology. Some languages exhibit mixed systems and are described as partially or strongly agglutinative.

In linguistic typology, agglutination is a major strategy for inflection and word formation, enabling long, expressive words with relatively transparent morphology. The concept has a long history in linguistics and remains a standard description for many language families today.