A
fusional language (also called
inflecting language) is a type of
synthetic language, distinguished from
agglutinative languages by its tendency to "squish together" many
morphemes in a way which can be difficult to segment.
The canonical examples of fusional languages are Latin, Russian, German or Polish; in general, all conservative Indo-European languages are fusional. Another notable group of fusional languages is the Semitic languages group. A high degree of fusion is also found in many Sami languages, such as Skolt Sami.
A good illustration of fusionality in language is the Latin word bonus, "good" (masculine). The ending -us denotes masculine gender, nominative case, and singular number. Changing any of these features requires replacement of the suffix -us with something else.
A feature that distinguishes fusional languages from agglutinating ones is the occurrence of irregular forms this wouldn't happen in an agglutinating language since the synthetic elements retain a meaning of their own. Fusional languages are generally believed to have descended from agglutinating languages, though there is no linguistic evidence in the form of attested language changes to confirm this view. On the other hand, fusional languages generally tend to lose their inflection over the centuries—some languages much more quickly than others[1] . For example, Slovenian, Lithuanian, and Armenian are about as fusional as Proto-Indo-European, but modern English and Afrikaans are nearly analytic. The Slavic languages have generally retained their inflection.
