Agglutinative is an adjective used to describe a grammatical structure or language that employs agglutination. Agglutination refers to a process by which morphemes, or meaningful linguistic units, are joined together to form words. In an agglutinative language, these morphemes retain their individual meanings and are visibly identifiable within the word.
Unlike fusional languages, which use inflectional endings to express grammatical information, agglutinative languages tend to attach separate morphemes to a base word, each representing a particular grammatical function. These affixes may indicate aspects such as tense, mood, number, case, or person. Consequently, agglutinative languages often have a wide variety of affixes that can combine in an almost limitless number of ways, allowing for complex word formations.
For example, in the Turkish word "evlerden" (meaning "from the houses"), the morphemes "ev" (house), "ler" (plural), and "den" (from) are visibly separate, allowing the reader or listener to recognize the individual meaning of each morpheme within the word itself.
Agglutinative languages can be found in various regions around the world, including certain Native American, African, and Asian languages. Finnish, Hungarian, and Turkish are among the oft-cited examples of agglutinative languages.
In summary, to be agglutinative is to possess a linguistic structure in which words are formed through the attachment of discrete morphemes that express particular grammatical features, allowing for flexibility and precision in conveying various shades of meaning.
