suffiks

Suffiks are bound morphemes attached to the end of a word (the base, stem, or form) to modify its meaning or its grammatical function. They are a common mechanism of word formation in many languages and are distinguished from prefixes, which attach at the beginning, and infixes or circumfixes, which attach elsewhere or around the base.

Two broad roles are commonly recognized: inflectional suffiks, which signal grammatical features such as tense, number, case, or mood without changing the word’s core category; and derivational suffiks, which create new words or shift their part of speech (for example turning an adjective into a noun or a noun into a verb).

English examples include the plural suffiks -s or -es (cats, boxes), the past tense -ed (walked), and the present participle -ing (walking). Derivational suffiks include -ness (happiness), -able (readable), and -ize (realize).

In cross-linguistic perspective, suffiks are especially prominent in agglutinative languages, such as Turkish, where long strings of suffixes mark subject, object, tense, case, and aspect. In fusional languages, such as Spanish or Russian, a single suffiks may encode multiple grammatical features. Other languages, such as Finnish and Hungarian, rely heavily on suffixal endings to signal case and number.

Phonology often yields allomorphs of a suffiks. For example, English plural -s appears as [s], [z], or [ɪz] depending on the preceding sound. Morphologically, suffiks contribute to productivity and word formation, enabling rapid creation of related terms without changing base stems.