Agglutinative language
An
agglutinative language is a
language in which the
words are formed by joining
morphemes together. This term was introduced by
Wilhelm von Humboldt in
1836 to classify languages from a
morphological point of view. It was derived from the
Latin verb
agglutinare, which means "to glue together".
An agglutinative language is a form of
synthetic language where each
affix typically represents one unit of meaning (such as "diminutive", "past tense", "plural", etc.), and bound morphemes are expressed by affixes (and not by internal changes of the root of the word, or changes in stress or tone). Besides, and most importantly, in an agglutinative language affixes do not become fused with others, and do not change form conditioned by others.
Synthetic languages which are not agglutinative are called
fusional languages; they sometimes combine affixes by "squeezing" them together, often changing them drastically in the process, and joining several meanings in one affix (for example, in the Spanish word
comí (
I ate), the suffix -
í carries the meanings of indicative
mood, past
tense, first person singular
subject and perfect
aspect).
Agglutinative is sometimes used as a synonym for
synthetic, although it technically is not. When used in this way, the word embraces
fusional languages and
inflected languages in general. The distinction between an agglutinative and a fusional language is often not sharp. Rather, one should think of these as two ends of a continuum, with various languages falling more toward one end or the other. In fact, a synthetic language may present agglutinative features in its open lexicon but not in its case system: for example,
German,
Dutch.
Agglutinative languages tend to have a high rate of affixes/morphemes per word, and to be very regular. For example,
Japanese has only three irregular verbs (and not
very irregular),
Nahuatl only two and
Turkish has only one.
Georgian is an exception; not only is it highly agglutinative (there can be simultaneously up to 8 morphemes per word), but there are also significant number of irregular verbs, varying in degrees of irregularity.
Examples of agglutinative languages are the
Altaic languages (see
Turkish), many
Tibeto-Burman languages,
Basque, the
Dravidian languages, the
Uralic languages,
Inuktitut,
Swahili,
Zulu,
Malay, the
Northeast,
Northwest and
South Caucasian languages, and some
Mesoamerican and native North American languages including
Nahuatl,
Huastec, and
Salish. In the past, much of the
ancient Near East also spoke such languages, such as
Sumerian,
Elamite,
Hurrian,
Urartian,
Hattic,
Gutian,
Lullubi,
Punjabi and
Kassite. Examples of agglutinative
constructed language are
Klingon and Tolkien's
Black Speech of Mordor.
Agglutinative languages are not entirely grouped by the family (although
Finnish,
Estonian and
Hungarian are definitely related, and it is often posited that
Japanese and
Korean are related). It is possible that
convergent evolution had many separate languages develop this property, but 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 again into agglutinative synthetic languages.
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Agglutination
