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. For example, 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 ...

verb ''comer'' ("to eat") has the first-person singular preterite tense form ''comí'' ("I ate"); the single suffix ''-í'' represents ''both'' the features of first-person singular agreement and preterite tense, instead of having a separate affix for each feature. Another illustration of fusionality is 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 ...

word ("good"). The ending denotes masculine gender, nominative case, and singular

number A number is a mathematical object used to count, measure, and label. The original examples are the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and so forth. Numbers can be represented in language with number words. More universally, individual numbers c ...

. Changing any one of these features requires replacing the suffix with a different one. In the form , the ending denotes masculine accusative singular, neuter accusative singular, or neuter nominative singular.

Indo-European languages

Examples of fusional

Indo-European languages The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutc ...

include: all

Balto-Slavic languages The Balto-Slavic languages form a branch of the Indo-European family of languages, traditionally comprising the Baltic and Slavic languages. Baltic and Slavic languages share several linguistic traits not found in any other Indo-European branc ...

(including Polish,

Russian Russian(s) refers to anything related to Russia, including: *Russians (, ''russkiye''), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries *Rossiyane (), Russian language term for all citizens and peo ...

, and Ukrainian);

Sanskrit Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late ...

, Pashto, modern Indo-Aryan languages (such as Hindustani, Kashmiri, and Punjabi);

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

(classical and modern),

Italian Italian(s) may refer to: * Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries ** Italians, an ethnic group or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom ** Italian language, a Romance language *** Regional Ita ...

, French,

, Portuguese and Romanian;

Irish Irish may refer to: Common meanings * Someone or something of, from, or related to: ** Ireland, an island situated off the north-western coast of continental Europe ***Éire, Irish language name for the isle ** Northern Ireland, a constituent unit ...

, German, Faroese, Icelandic, and Albanian.

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 ...

are weakly fusional.

Semitic languages

Another notable group of fusional languages is the

Semitic languages The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They are spoken by more than 330 million people across much of West Asia, the Horn of Africa, and latterly North Africa, Malta, West Africa, Chad, and in large immigra ...

group; however, Modern Hebrew is much more analytic than

Classical Hebrew Biblical Hebrew (, or , ), also called Classical Hebrew, is an archaic form of the Hebrew language, a language in the Canaanite branch of Semitic languages spoken by the Israelites in the area known as the Land of Israel, roughly west of t ...

"both with nouns and with verbs". Colloquial varieties of Arabic are more analytic than modern standard Arabic, having lost all noun declensions, and in many cases also featuring simplified conjugation.

Uralic languages

A limited degree of fusion is also found in many Uralic languages, like Hungarian, Estonian,

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 ...

, and the Sami languages, such as Skolt Sami, as these languages are primarily agglutinative.

Outside Eurasia

Americas

Unusual for a natively North American language, Navajo is sometimes described as fusional due to its complex and inseparable verb morphology. Some

Amazonian languages Amazonian languages is the term used to refer to the indigenous languages of "Greater Amazonia." This area is significantly larger than the Amazon and extends from the Atlantic coast all the way to the Andes, while its southern border is usual ...

(such as

Ayoreo The Ayoreo (Ayoreode, Ayoréo, Ayoréode) are an indigenous people of the Gran Chaco. They live in an area surrounded by the Paraguay, Pilcomayo, Parapetí, and Grande Rivers, spanning both Bolivia and Paraguay. There are approximately 5,600 ...

) have fusional morphology.Bertinetto, Pier Marco 2009. ''Ayoreo (Zamuco). A grammatical sketch''. Quaderni del Laboratorio di Linguistica della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. 8 n.s

/ref> The Fuegian languages, Fuegian language

Selk'nam The Selk'nam, also known as the Onawo or Ona people, are an indigenous people in the Patagonian region of southern Argentina and Chile, including the Tierra del Fuego islands. They were one of the last native groups in South America to be enco ...

has fusional elements. For example, both

evidentiality In linguistics, evidentiality is, broadly, the indication of the nature of evidence for a given statement; that is, whether evidence exists for the statement and if so, what kind. An evidential (also verificational or validational) is the particul ...

and gender agreement are coded with a single suffix on the verb:

Africa

Some Nilo-Saharan languages such as Lugbara are also considered fusional.

History

Fusional languages generally tend to lose their inflection over the centuriessome languages much more quickly than others.

Loss of fusionality

While Proto-Indo-European was fusional, some of its descendants have shifted to a more analytic structure, such as Modern English, Danish and Afrikaans, or agglutinative, such as

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 ...

and

Armenian Armenian may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to Armenia, a country in the South Caucasus region of Eurasia * Armenians, the national people of Armenia, or people of Armenian descent ** Armenian Diaspora, Armenian communities across the ...

. Other descendants remain fusional, including

Ancient Greek Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic p ...

, Lithuanian, Latvian,

Slavic languages The Slavic languages, also known as the Slavonic languages, are Indo-European languages spoken primarily by the Slavic peoples and their descendants. They are thought to descend from a proto-language called Proto-Slavic, spoken during the ...

, as well as

and the

Romance languages The Romance languages, sometimes referred to as Latin languages or Neo-Latin languages, are the various modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages in the Indo-European language ...

and certain Germanic languages.

Gain of fusionality

Some languages shift over time from agglutinative to fusional. For example, while most

Uralic language The Uralic languages (; sometimes called Uralian languages ) form a language family of 38 languages spoken by approximately 25million people, predominantly in Northern Eurasia. The Uralic languages with the most native speakers are Hungarian (w ...

s are predominantly agglutinative, Estonian is markedly evolving in the direction of a fusional language. On the other hand,

, its close relative, exhibits fewer fusional traits, thereby keeping closer to the mainstream Uralic type. However,

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 ...

, also part of the Uralic family, have gained more fusionality than Finnish and Estonian, not just involving

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 ...

but also vowel apophony.

Declension

One feature of many fusional languages is their systems of declensions. Here nouns and adjectives have a suffix attached to them to specify grammatical case (their uses in the clause),

, and

grammatical gender In linguistics, grammatical gender system is a specific form of noun class system, where nouns are assigned with gender categories that are often not related to their real-world qualities. In languages with grammatical gender, most or all noun ...

; pronouns may alter their forms entirely to encode this information. Within a fusional language, there are usually more than one declension;

and

have five, and

Slavic language The Slavic languages, also known as the Slavonic languages, are Indo-European languages spoken primarily by the Slavic peoples and their descendants. They are thought to descend from a proto-language called Proto-Slavic, spoken during the Ea ...

s have anywhere between three and seven. German has multiple based on whatever vowel or consonant the word ends with and can often be unpredictable. However, many descendants of fusional languages tend to lose their case marking. In most

Romance Romance (from Vulgar Latin , "in the Roman language", i.e., "Latin") may refer to: Common meanings * Romance (love), emotional attraction towards another person and the courtship behaviors undertaken to express the feelings * Romance languages, ...

and Germanic languages, including modern English (with the notable exceptions of German and Icelandic), encoding for case is merely vestigial; this is because it no longer encompasses nouns and adjectives, but only pronouns. Compare the

''egli'' (masculine singular nominative), ''gli'' (masculine singular dative, or indirect object), ''lo'' (masculine singular accusative) and ''lui'' (also masculine singular accusative, but emphatic and indirect case to be used with prepositions), corresponding to the single vestigial pair ''he, him'' in English.

Conjugation

Conjugation is the alteration of the form of a verb to encode information about some or all of grammatical mood, voice, tense,

aspect Aspect or Aspects may refer to: Entertainment * ''Aspect magazine'', a biannual DVD magazine showcasing new media art * Aspect Co., a Japanese video game company * Aspects (band), a hip hop group from Bristol, England * ''Aspects'' (Benny Carter ...

, person,

, and

. In a fusional language, two or more of these pieces of information may be conveyed in a single morpheme, typically a suffix. For example, in French, the verbal suffix depends on the mood, tense, and aspect of the verb, as well as on the person and number (but not the gender) of its subject. This gives rise to typically forty-five different single-word forms of the verb, each conveying some or all of the following: *mood (

indicative A realis mood ( abbreviated ) is a grammatical mood which is used principally to indicate that something is a statement of fact; in other words, to express what the speaker considers to be a known state of affairs, as in declarative sentences. Mos ...

, subjunctive, conditional, or imperative) *tense (

past The past is the set of all events that occurred before a given point in time. The past is contrasted with and defined by the present and the future. The concept of the past is derived from the linear fashion in which human observers experience ...

, present or future) *aspect (

perfective The perfective aspect ( abbreviated ), sometimes called the aoristic aspect, is a grammatical aspect that describes an action viewed as a simple whole; i.e., a unit without interior composition. The perfective aspect is distinguished from the i ...

or imperfective) *person (first, second, or third), and *number (singular or plural). To change any one of these pieces of information without changing the others requires using a different suffix, the key characteristic of fusionality. English has two examples of conjugational fusion. The verbal suffix ''-s'' indicates a combination of present tense with both third person and singularity of the associated subject, and the verbal suffix ''-ed'', used in a verb with no auxiliary verb, conveys both non-progressive aspect and past tense.

References

{{reflist Synthetic languages eo:Lingva tipologio#Aglutinaj kaj fandaj lingvoj