Agglutination

Agglutination is a process in linguistic morphology derivation in which complex words are formed by stringing together morphemes without changing them in spelling or phonetics. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglutinative languages. An example of such a language is Turkish, where for example, the word evlerinizden, or "from your houses," consists of the morphemes, ev-ler-iniz-den with the meanings house-plural-your-from.

Agglutinative languages are often contrasted both with languages in which syntactic structure is expressed solely by means of word order and auxiliary words (isolating languages) and with languages in which a single affix typically expresses several syntactic categories and a single category may be expressed by several different affixes (as is the case in inflectional (fusional) languages). However, both fusional and isolating languages may use agglutination in the most-often-used constructs, and use agglutination heavily in certain contexts, such as word derivation. This is the case in English, which has an agglutinated plural marker -(e)s and derived words such as shame·less·ness.

Agglutinative suffixes are often inserted irrespective of syllabic boundaries, for example, by adding a consonant to the syllable coda as in English tie – ties. Agglutinative languages also have large inventories of enclitics, which can be and are separated from the word root by native speakers in daily usage.

Note that the term agglutination is sometimes used more generally to refer to the morphological process of adding suffixes or other morphemes to the base of a word. This is treated in more detail in the section on other uses of the term.

Although agglutination is characteristic of certain language families, this does not mean that when several languages in a certain geographic area are all agglutinative, they are necessarily related phylogenetically. In particular, such a conclusion formerly led linguists to propose the so-called Ural–Altaic language family, which would (in the largest scope ever proposed) include the Uralic and Turkic languages as well as Mongolian, Korean and Japanese. However, contemporary linguistics views this proposal as controversial.

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