flektierende

Flektierende is an adjective form of flektieren and is used in linguistics to describe words, forms, or languages that express grammatical relations primarily through inflection. In this sense, flektierende Formen (inflected forms) encode information such as case, number, gender, tense, mood, person, or voice. The term is common in grammars when distinguishing inflected languages from isolating ones.

In practice, flektierende Sprachsysteme use a variety of endings and forms to signal grammatical relations rather than relying on word order alone. Examples of inflected forms include nouns showing case in languages like German, Russian, and Latin; adjectives that take endings to agree with nouns in gender, number, and case (for instance, groß, größer, am größten in German); and verbs that conjugate for person, number, tense, and mood (ich gehe, du gehst, er ging). Pronouns also inflect, as in ich, mich, mir.

Flektierende Sprachen are those with substantial morphology, where mutu­lial changes in form are a primary mechanism for encoding grammatical meaning. This concept is often contrasted with agglutinative languages—where affixes are more numerous but typically carry single meanings—and isolating languages—where little or no inflection occurs. Many languages exhibit mixed systems with varying degrees of flexion.

Etymology and related terms: flektieren comes from Latin flectere, “to bend.” Related concepts in linguistics include Flexion (inflection), Deklination (declension), Konjugation (conjugation), and Morphologie.