inflektiivsus

Inflektiivsus, or inflection, is the process by which a word changes form to convey grammatical information without altering its core meaning. In languages with inflection, nouns, adjectives, pronouns and verbs can take different endings or undergo stem changes to express features such as case, number, gender, tense, mood, voice, aspect, person and definiteness.

Inflection is usually carried by affixes attached to a word stem, most commonly as suffixes. Some languages also use internal vowel changes or other types of affixes. Estonian and related Finno-Ugric languages are widely described as highly inflectional and agglutinative, meaning that many grammatical categories are expressed through a sequence of suffixes added to a stem.

The main word classes involved in inflection include nouns (often marking number and a system of cases), verbs (marking person, number, tense, mood, aspect and voice), adjectives (agreeing with the nouns they modify in number and case), and pronouns (inflecting for person, number and case). Gender, when present, may be limited or absent depending on the language.

Inflection contrasts with derivation, which changes a word’s meaning or part of speech and often produces new words. In highly inflectional languages, syntactic relations are frequently signaled by word-endings rather than fixed word order, allowing for more flexible sentence construction. Inflektiivsus is a fundamental aspect of morphology and is studied across many language families to compare how different languages encode grammatical information. See also morphology and inflection.