agglutinatiivse

Agglutinative languages are a branch of linguistic typology in which words are formed by stringing together sequences of morphemes, each carrying a single grammatical meaning. The term comes from the idea of gluing morphemes to a base word, producing long words with clearly segmented parts.

In agglutinative systems, morpheme boundaries are typically transparent. Affixes attach to a stem in a linear chain, and each suffix or prefix expresses one grammatical function—such as tense, number, case, or mood. This contrasts with fusional languages, where a single affix may encode multiple categories, and with isolating languages, where words tend to be monomorphemic and rely more on word order for grammar.

Common examples cited as agglutinative include Turkish, Finnish, Hungarian, Basque, Japanese, and Swahili. These languages routinely form complex words by attaching multiple suffixes (and sometimes prefixes) in sequence, allowing rich grammatical information to be carried within a single word without extensive internal fusion.

Nevertheless, many languages show degrees of agglutination rather than pure forms. Some morphemes may convey more than one function, or irregular patterns may blur boundaries between morphemes. Consequently, linguistic classification often portrays agglutination as a spectrum rather than a binary category.

The study of agglutinative languages aids comparisons across language families and sheds light on historical change, inflectional productivity, and the range of strategies human languages employ to encode grammatical relationships within words.