In
linguistics,
agglutination is the
morphological process of adding
affixes to the
base of a
word. Languages that use agglutination widely are called
agglutinative languages. These languages are often contrasted with
fusional languages and
isolating languages. However, both fusional and isolating languages may use agglutination in the most-often-used constructs, and use agglutination heavily in certain contexts, such as word derivation. This is the case in
English, which is an isolating language, but has an agglutinated plural marker
-(e)s and derived words such as
shame·less·ness.
Agglutinative suffixes are often inserted irrespective of syllabic boundaries, for example, by adding a consonant to the syllable coda as in English tie — ties. Native speakers of strongly agglutinating languages untrained in linguistics cannot usually break down an agglutinated word into its components. Agglutinative languages also have large inventories of enclitics, too, which can be and are separated from the word root by native speakers in daily usage.
Examples of European agglutinative languages are the Finno-Ugric languages, such as Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian. These have highly agglutinated expressions in daily usage, and most words are bisyllablic or longer. Grammatical information expressed by adpositions in Western Indo-European languages is typically found in suffixes. For example, the Finnish word talossanikin means "in my house, too". Derivation can also be quite complex. For example, Finnish epäjärjestelmällisyys has the root järki "logos", and consists of negative-"logos"-causative-frequentative-nominalizer-adessive-"related to"-"property", and means "the property of being unsystematic," "unsystematicalness." The word has lots of stem changes, so Finnish is not the best example for an agglutinative language.
Agglutination is used very heavily in some Native American languages, such as Nahuatl, Quechua and K'iche, where one word can contain enough morphemes to convey the meaning of what would be a complex sentence in other languages.
