agglutinatiivisiin

Agglutinatiivinen is a linguistic term used to describe a type of morphological structure in which words are formed by a sequence of affixes, each carrying a single grammatical meaning. The Finnish form agglutinatiivisiin is the adjective’s inflected form, used when describing such languages in contexts requiring agreement with a plural noun in certain cases. In linguistic typology, agglutinativity refers to this strategy of attaching morphemes in a transparent, suffix-rich chain rather than by fusing multiple meanings into one affix.

In agglutinative languages, grammatical relationships are typically expressed by discrete morphemes attached to a base word. Morphemes tend to remain separable and well-defined, allowing speakers and analysts to identify individual meanings within a word. This often yields long word forms that encode tense, mood, number, case, possession and derivation through a string of suffixes. Word order is important but can be more flexible than in highly isolating languages, since much of the grammatical information is carried by the affixes.

Commonly cited examples of predominantly agglutinative languages include Turkish, Finnish, Hungarian, Basque, and various Bantu languages like Swahili. Some languages described as agglutinative also exhibit fusional or irregular elements, showing that real-world morphology often sits on a continuum between typological categories. Agglutinativity is contrasted with fusional systems, where affixes encode multiple meanings, and isolating languages, which rely more on word order and little morphology.

In linguistic scholarship, agglutination serves as a useful, though general, classification of morphological strategies. It helps explain patterns of word formation and grammatical encoding without implying strict genetic clustering.