Agglutinative language
An
agglutinative language is a type of synthetic language with morphology that primarily uses agglutination: words are formed by joining phonetically unchangeable affix morphemes to the stem. In agglutinative languages, each affix is a bound morpheme for one unit of meaning, instead of morphological modifications with internal changes of the root of the word, or changes in stress or tone. In an agglutinative language stems do not change, affixes do not fuse with other affixes, and affixes do not change form conditioned by other affixes. The term was introduced by Wilhelm von Humboldt to classify languages from a morphological point of view. It is derived from the Latin verb
agglutinare, which means "to glue together". Non-agglutinative synthetic languages are fusional languages; morphologically, they combine affixes by "squeezing" them together, drastically changing them in the process, and joining several meanings in a single affix. The term
agglutinative is sometimes incorrectly used as a synonym for synthetic. Used in this way, the term embraces both fusional languages and inflected languages.