Anagglutinative language is a type of language that primarily forms words by stringing together morphemes (word parts)—each typically representing a single grammatical meaning—without significant modification to their forms (agglutinations). In such languages,affixes (prefixes,suffixes,infixes, orcircumfixes) are added to a root word in a linear and systematic way, creating complex words that encode detailed grammatical information. This structure allows for a high degree of transparency, as the boundaries between morphemes are usually clear and their meanings consistent.[1]
Despite occasional outliers, agglutinative languages tend to have more easily deducible word meanings compared tofusional languages, which allow unpredictable modifications in either or both thephonetics ormorphology of one or more morphemes within a word.
Agglutinative languages have generally onegrammatical category per affix while fusional languages combine multiple into one. The term was introduced byWilhelm von Humboldt to classify languages from amorphological point of view.[3] It is derived from theLatin verbagglutinare, which means "to glue together".[4] For example, the English wordantidisestablishmentarianism can be broken up intoanti- "against",dis- "to deprive of",establish (here referring to the formation of the Church of England),-ment "the act of",-arian "a person who", and-ism "the ideology of". On the other hand, in a word such asruns, the singular suffix-s indicates the verb is both in third person and present tense, and cannot be further broken down into a "third person" morpheme and a "present tense" morpheme; this behavior is reminiscent of fusional languages.
The termagglutinative is sometimes incorrectly used as a synonym forsynthetic, but that term also includes fusional languages. The agglutinative and fusional languages are two ends of a continuum, with various languages falling more toward one end or the other. For example,Japanese is generally agglutinative, but displays fusion in some nouns, such asotōto (弟; "younger brother"), fromoto +hito (originallywoto +hito, "young, younger" + "person"), and Japanese verbs, adjectives, the copula, and their affixes undergo sound transformations. For example,kaku (書く; "to write; [someone] writes") affixed withmasu (ます; politeness suffix) andta (た; past tense marker) becomeskakimashita (書きました; "[someone] wrote", with the-mas- portion used to express a politely distanced social context to the intended audience). A synthetic language may use morphological agglutination combined with partial usage of fusional features, for example in its case system (e.g.,German,Dutch, andPersian).
Persian has some features of agglutination, making use of prefixes and suffixes attached to the stems of verbs and nouns. Persian is asubject–object–verb (SOV) language, thus having a head-final phrase structure.[5] Persian utilizes a noun root + plural suffix + case suffix + post-position suffix syntax similar to Turkish. For example the phrase "xodróhāyešān-rā minegaristam/خودروهایشان را مینگریستم" meaning 'I was looking at their cars' lit. '(cars their at) (I was looking)'. Breaking down the first word:خودروxodró (car) +ها(ی)hāye (plural suffix) +شانšān (possessive suffix) +راrā (post-positional suffix) becomesخودروهایشان را/xodróhāyešān-rā. One can see its agglutinative nature and the fact that Persian is able to affix a given number of dependent morphemes to a root morpheme,xodró (car).
Turkish is generally agglutinative, forming words in a similar manner:araba (car) +lar (plural) +ın (possessive suffix, performing the same function as "of" in English) +a (dative suffix, for the recipient of an action, like "to" in English) formsarabalarına (lit.'to their cars'). However, these suffixes depend uponvowel harmony: doing the same toev ("house") formsevlerine (to their houses). However, there are other features of the Turkish language that could be considered fusional, such as the suffixes for the simple present tense. This is the only tense where, rather than having a suffix did[clarification needed] negation which can be included before the temporal suffix, there are two different suffixes – one for affirmative and one for negative. Giving examples usingsevmek ("to love" or "to like"):
English
Turkish
Formation
I liked
sevdim
sev- "like"
-di (past tense)
-m (first person singular)
I did not like
sevmedim
sev- "like"
-me "not"
-di (past tense)
-m (first person singular)
I like
severim
sev- "like"
-er (present tense)
-im (first person singular)
I do not like
sevmem
sev- "like"
-me (negative present tense)
-m (first person singular)
Agglutinative languages tend to have a high rate of affixes or morphemes per word, and to be very regular, in particular with very fewirregular verbs – for example, Japanese hasonly two considered fully irregular, and only about a dozen others with only minor irregularity;Luganda has only one (or two, depending on how "irregular" is defined); while in theQuechua languages, all ordinary verbs are regular. Again, exceptions exist, such as inGeorgian.
Agglutination is a typological feature and does not imply a linguistic relation, but there are some families of agglutinative languages. For example, theProto-Uralic language, the ancestor of theUralic languages, was agglutinative, and most descendant languages inherit this feature. But since agglutination can arise in languages that previously had a non-agglutinative typology, and it can be lost in languages that previously were agglutinative, agglutination as a typological trait cannot be used as evidence of a genetic relationship to other agglutinative languages. The uncertain theory aboutUral-Altaic proffers that there is a genetic relationship with this proto-language as seen inFinnish,Mongolian andTurkish,[9] and occasionally as well asManchurian,Japanese andKorean.
Many languages have developed agglutination. This developmental phenomenon is known aslanguage drift, such asIndonesian andMalay. There seems to exist a preferred evolutionary direction from agglutinative synthetic languages tofusional synthetic languages, and then tonon-synthetic languages, which in their turn evolve intoisolating languages and from there again into agglutinative synthetic languages. However, this is just a trend, and in itself a combination of the trend observable ingrammaticalization theory and that of general linguistic attrition, especially word-finalapocope andelision.
