An agglutinative language is a type of synthetic language with

morphology Morphology, from the Greek and meaning "study of shape", may refer to: Disciplines * Morphology (archaeology), study of the shapes or forms of artifacts * Morphology (astronomy), study of the shape of astronomical objects such as nebulae, galaxies ...

that primarily uses agglutination. Words may contain different morphemes to determine their meanings, but all of these morphemes (including stems and affixes) tend to remain unchanged after their unions, although this is not a rule: for example,

Finnish Finnish may refer to: * Something or someone from, or related to Finland * Culture of Finland * Finnish people or Finns, the primary ethnic group in Finland * Finnish language, the national language of the Finnish people * Finnish cuisine See also ...

is a typical agglutinative language, but morphemes are subject to (sometimes unpredictable) consonant alternations called

consonant gradation Consonant gradation is a type of consonant mutation (mostly lenition but also assimilation) found in some Uralic languages, more specifically in the Finnic, Samic and Samoyedic branches. It originally arose as an allophonic alternation betw ...

. Despite the occasional outliers, agglutinative languages tend to have more easily deducible word meanings if compared to

fusional language Fusional languages or inflected languages are a type of synthetic language, distinguished from agglutinative languages by their tendency to use a single inflectional morpheme to denote multiple grammatical, syntactic, or semantic features. ...

s, which allow unpredictable modifications in either or both the

phonetics Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians. ...

or spelling of one or more morphemes within a word. This usually results in a shortening of the word, or it provides easier pronunciation.

Overview

Agglutinative languages have generally one

grammatical category In linguistics, a grammatical category or grammatical feature is a property of items within the grammar of a language. Within each category there are two or more possible values (sometimes called grammemes), which are normally mutually exclusiv ...

per affix while fusional languages have multiple. The term was introduced by Wilhelm von Humboldt to classify languages from a morphological point of view. It is derived from the

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

verb ''agglutinare'', which means "to glue together". Non-agglutinative synthetic languages are fusional languages; morphologically, they combine affixes by "squeezing" them together, drastically changing them in the process, and joining several meanings in a single affix. For example, in the

Spanish Spanish might refer to: * Items from or related to Spain: **Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain **Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries **Spanish cuisine Other places * Spanish, Ontario, Can ...

word ''comí'' ("I ate"), the suffix -''í'' carries the meanings of first person, singular number, past tense, perfective aspect, indicative mood, active voice. The term ''agglutinative'' is sometimes incorrectly used as a synonym for synthetic, but that term also includes fusional languages. The agglutinative and fusional languages are two ends of a continuum, with various languages falling more toward one or the other end. For example,

Japanese Japanese may refer to: * Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia * Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan * Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture ** Japanese diaspor ...

is generally agglutinative, but displays fusion in some nouns, such as , from ''oto'' + ''hito'' (originally ''woto'' + ''pito'', "young, younger" + "person"), and Japanese verbs, adjectives, the copula, and their affixes undergo sound transformations. For example, affixed with and becomes . A synthetic language may use morphological agglutination combined with partial usage of fusional features, for example in its case system (e.g., German,

Dutch Dutch commonly refers to: * Something of, from, or related to the Netherlands * Dutch people () * Dutch language () Dutch may also refer to: Places * Dutch, West Virginia, a community in the United States * Pennsylvania Dutch Country People E ...

, and

Persian Persian may refer to: * People and things from Iran, historically called ''Persia'' in the English language ** Persians, the majority ethnic group in Iran, not to be conflated with the Iranic peoples ** Persian language, an Iranian language of the ...

). Agglutinative languages tend to have a high rate of affixes or morphemes per word, and to be very regular, in particular with very few irregular verbs. For example, Japanese has very few irregular verbs – only two are significantly irregular, and there are only about a dozen others with only minor irregularity; Luganda has only one (or two, depending on how "irregular" is defined); while in the

Quechua languages Quechua (, ; ), usually called ("people's language") in Quechuan languages, is an indigenous language family spoken by the Quechua peoples, primarily living in the Peruvian Andes. Derived from a common ancestral language, it is the most widel ...

, all the ordinary verbs are regular. Both Georgian and

Korean Korean may refer to: People and culture * Koreans, ethnic group originating in the Korean Peninsula * Korean cuisine * Korean culture * Korean language **Korean alphabet, known as Hangul or Chosŏn'gŭl **Korean dialects and the Jeju language ** ...

are exceptions; such languages have a significant number of irregular verbs.

Examples

Examples of agglutinative languages include: * Indigenous languages of the Americas **

Algonquian languages The Algonquian languages ( or ; also Algonkian) are a subfamily of indigenous American languages that include most languages in the Algic language family. The name of the Algonquian language family is distinguished from the orthographically simi ...

*** Cree (also classified as polysynthetic) *** Blackfoot (partially fusional) ** Siouan languages ** Iroquoian languages *** Cherokee language **

Yuchi The Yuchi people, also spelled Euchee and Uchee, are a Native American tribe based in Oklahoma. In the 16th century, Yuchi people lived in the eastern Tennessee River valley in Tennessee. In the late 17th century, they moved south to Alabama, G ...

** Athabaskan languages **

Muskogean languages Muskogean (also Muskhogean, Muskogee) is a Native American language family spoken in different areas of the Southeastern United States. Though the debate concerning their interrelationships is ongoing, the Muskogean languages are generally div ...

** Quechuan languages **

Aymaran languages Aymaran (also Jaqi or Aru) is one of the two dominant language families in the central Andes alongside Quechuan. The family consists of Aymara, widely spoken in Bolivia, and the endangered Jaqaru and Kawki languages of Peru. Hardman (1978) pro ...

** Arawakan languages **

Tupian languages The Tupi or Tupian language family comprises some 70 languages spoken in South America, of which the best known are Tupi proper and Guarani. Homeland and ''urheimat'' Rodrigues (2007) considers the Proto-Tupian urheimat to be somewhere betwee ...

*** Tupi language (Brazil) *** Nheengatu (Brazil) ** Araucanian languages ** Salishan languages ** Mesoamerican languages *** Nahuatl *** Wasteko * Austronesian languages ** Tagalog ** Malay (partially isolating) ** Indonesian (partially isolating) ** Sundanese ** Javanese ** Kapampangan ** Ilokano ** Pangasinan ** Chamorro * Niger–Congo languages ** Bantu languages * Berber languages * Dravidian languages ** Tamil ** Telugu **

Malayalam Malayalam (; , ) is a Dravidian languages, Dravidian language spoken in the Indian state of Kerala and the union territories of Lakshadweep and Puducherry (union territory), Puducherry (Mahé district) by the Malayali people. It is one of 2 ...

** Tulu * Eskimo–Aleut languages **

Aleut The Aleuts ( ; russian: Алеуты, Aleuty) are the indigenous people of the Aleutian Islands, which are located between the North Pacific Ocean and the Bering Sea. Both the Aleut people and the islands are politically divided between the ...

** Inuktitut **

Yupik Yupik may refer to: * Yupik peoples, a group of indigenous peoples of Alaska and the Russian Far East * Yupik languages, a group of Eskimo-Aleut languages Yupꞌik (with the apostrophe) may refer to: * Yup'ik people The Yup'ik or Yupiaq (sg ...

* Turkic languages ** Turkish ** Azerbaijani ** Uzbek ** Kazakh ** Karakalpak ** Uyghur ** Turkmen ** Kyrgyz ** Tatar ** Yakut ** Bashkir ** Chuvash ** Crimean Tatar ** Tuvan ** Southern Altai ** Karachay-Balkar ** Kumyk ** Karaim * Tungusic languages *

Japonic languages Japonic or Japanese–Ryukyuan, sometimes also Japanic, is a language family comprising Japanese, spoken in the main islands of Japan, and the Ryukyuan languages, spoken in the Ryukyu Islands. The family is universally accepted by linguists, and ...

** Ryukyuan *

* Mongolic languages ** Mongolian language ** Kalmyk language **

Buryat language Buryat, or Buriat (; Buryat Cyrillic: , , ), known in foreign sources as the Bargu-Buryat dialect of Mongolian, and in pre-1956 Soviet sources as Buryat-Mongolian,In China, the Buryat language is classified as the Bargu-Buryat dialect of the Mon ...

Moghol language Moghol (or Mogholi; Dari: ) is a critically endangered or possibly extinct Mongolic languages, Mongolic language spoken in the province of Herat Province, Herat, Afghanistan, in the villages of Kundur, Afghanistan, Kundur and Karez-i-Mulla. The sp ...

Oirat language Oirat (Clear script: , , ; Kalmyk: , ; Khalkha Mongolian: , ) is a Mongolic language spoken by the descendants of Oirat Mongols, now forming parts of Mongols in China, Kalmyks in Russia and Mongolians. Largely mutually intelligible to other co ...

** Khamnigan language *

Languages of the Caucasus The Caucasian languages comprise a large and extremely varied array of languages spoken by more than ten million people in and around the Caucasus Mountains, which lie between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. Linguistic comparison allows t ...

Kartvelian languages The Kartvelian languages (; ka, ქართველური ენები, tr; also known as South Caucasian, Kartvelic, and Iberian languagesBoeder (2002), p. 3) are a language family indigenous to the South Caucasus and spoken primari ...

** Northwest Caucasian languages **

Northeast Caucasian languages The Northeast Caucasian languages, also called East Caucasian, Nakh-Daghestani or ''Vainakh-Daghestani'', is a family of languages spoken in the Russian republics of Dagestan, Chechnya and Ingushetia and in Northern Azerbaijan as well as in ...

* Tibeto-Burman languages **Tibetan (both Classical and

Standard Standard may refer to: Symbols * Colours, standards and guidons, kinds of military signs * Standard (emblem), a type of a large symbol or emblem used for identification Norms, conventions or requirements * Standard (metrology), an object th ...

) ** Mizo ** Lai ** Burmese * Uralic languages **

Sámi languages Sámi languages ( ), in English also rendered as Sami and Saami, are a group of Uralic languages spoken by the Sámi people in Northern Europe (in parts of northern Finland, Norway, Sweden, and extreme northwestern Russia). There are, dependin ...

** Hungarian **

** Estonian ** Mordvinic ** Komi *

Basque Basque may refer to: * Basques, an ethnic group of Spain and France * Basque language, their language Places * Basque Country (greater region), the homeland of the Basque people with parts in both Spain and France * Basque Country (autonomous co ...

(fusional verb morphology) * Munda languages ** Santali Many unrelated languages spoken by

Ancient Near East The ancient Near East was the home of early civilizations within a region roughly corresponding to the modern Middle East: Mesopotamia (modern Iraq, southeast Turkey, southwest Iran and northeastern Syria), ancient Egypt, ancient Iran ( Elam, ...

peoples were agglutinative, though none from larger families have been identified: * Elamite * Hattic * Kassite *

Lullubi Lullubi, Lulubi ( akk, 𒇻𒇻𒉈: ''Lu-lu-bi'', akk, 𒇻𒇻𒉈𒆠: ''Lu-lu-biki'' "Country of the Lullubi"), more commonly known as Lullu, were a group of tribes during the 3rd millennium BC, from a region known as ''Lulubum'', now the Sha ...

* Sumerian language Some well known constructed languages are agglutinative, such as Esperanto,

Klingon The Klingons ( ; Klingon: ''tlhIngan'' ) are a fictional species in the science fiction franchise ''Star Trek''. Developed by screenwriter Gene L. Coon in 1967 for the original ''Star Trek'' (''TOS'') series, Klingons were swarthy humanoids c ...

, Quenya and Black Speech. Agglutination is a typological feature and does not imply a linguistic relation, but there are some families of agglutinative languages. For example, the

Proto-Uralic language Proto-Uralic is the unattested reconstructed language ancestral to the modern Uralic language family. The hypothetical language is believed to have been originally spoken in a small area in about 7000–2000 BCE, and expanded to give differentia ...

, the ancestor of the Uralic languages, was agglutinative, and most descended languages inherit this feature. But since agglutination can arise in languages that previously had a non-agglutinative typology and it can be lost in languages that previously were agglutinative, agglutination as a typological trait cannot be used as evidence of a genetic relationship to other agglutinative languages. The uncertain theory about

Ural-Altaic Ural-Altaic, Uralo-Altaic or Uraltaic is a linguistic convergence zone and former language-family proposal uniting the Uralic and the Altaic (in the narrow sense) languages. It is generally now agreed that even the Altaic languages do not share ...

proffers that there is a genetic relationship with this proto-language as seen in

, Mongolian and Turkish.Nicholas Poppe, The Uralo-Altaic Theory in the Light of the Soviet Linguistics
Accessed 2010-04-07 Many languages have developed agglutination. This developmental phenomenon is known as language drift. There seems to exist a preferred evolutionary direction from agglutinative synthetic languages to fusional synthetic languages, and then to non-synthetic languages, which in their turn evolve into

isolating language An isolating language is a type of language with a morpheme per word ratio close to one, and with no inflectional morphology whatsoever. In the extreme case, each word contains a single morpheme. Examples of widely spoken isolating language ...

s and from there again into agglutinative synthetic languages. However, this is just a trend, and in itself a combination of the trend observable in Grammaticalization theory and that of general linguistic attrition, especially word-final apocope and elision.

References

Citations

Sources

* Bodmer, Frederick. Ed. by Lancelot Hogben. ''The Loom of Language.'' New York, W.W. Norton and Co., 1944, renewed 1972, pages 53, 190ff. . {{DEFAULTSORT:Agglutinative Language Synthetic languages