An
agglutinative language is a
language that uses
agglutination extensively most
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."
[1]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). Additionally, and most importantly, in an agglutinative language affixes do not become fused with others, and do not change form conditioned by others.
Synthetic languages that 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, active voice, past tense, first person singular subject and perfect aspect).
Agglutinative languages tend to have a high rate of affixes/morphemes per word, and to be very regular[citation needed]. For example, Japanese has only two irregular verbs (and not very irregular), Luganda has only one (or two, depending on how 'irregular' is defined) 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.
