Everything about Agglutinative Language totally explained
An
agglutinative language is a
language that uses
agglutination extensively: most
words are formed by joining
morphemes together. This term was introduced by
Wilhelm von Humboldt in
1836 to classify languages from a
morphological point of view. It was derived from the
Latin verb
agglutinare, which means "to glue together."
An agglutinative language is a form of
synthetic language where each
affix typically represents one unit of meaning (such as "diminutive," "past tense," "plural," etc.), and bound morphemes are expressed by affixes (and not by internal changes of the root of the word, or changes in stress or tone). Additionally, and most importantly, in an agglutinative language affixes don't become fused with others, and don't change form conditioned by others.
Synthetic languages that are not agglutinative are called
fusional languages; they sometimes combine affixes by "squeezing" them together, often changing them drastically in the process, and joining several meanings in one affix (for example, in the
Spanish word
comí [
Iate], the suffix -
í carries the meanings of indicative
mood, active
voice, past
tense, first person singular
subject and perfect
aspect).
Agglutinative is sometimes used as a synonym for
synthetic, although it technically is not. When used in this way, the word embraces
fusional languages and
inflected languages in general. The distinction between an agglutinative and a fusional language is often not sharp. Rather, one should think of these as two ends of a continuum, with various languages falling more toward one end or the other. In fact, a synthetic language may present agglutinative features in its open lexicon but not in its case system: for example,
German,
Dutch.
Agglutinative languages tend to have a high rate of affixes/morphemes per word, and to be very regular. For example,
Japanese has only two
irregular verbs (and not
very irregular),
Luganda has only one (or two, depending on how 'irregular' is defined) and
Turkish has only one.
Georgian is an exception; not only is it highly agglutinative (there can be simultaneously up to 8 morphemes per word), but there are also significant number of irregular verbs, varying in degrees of irregularity.
Examples of agglutinative languages
Examples of agglutinative languages include
Basque,
Blackfoot, the
Altaic languages (see
Turkish),
Korean, many
Tibeto-Burman languages, the
Dravidian languages, many
Uralic languages (the largest are
Hungarian,
Finnish and
Estonian),
Inuktitut, the
Bantu languages (see
Luganda),
Indonesian &
Malay, the
Northeast,
Northwest and
South Caucasian languages, and some
Mesoamerican and native North American languages including
Nahuatl,
Huastec, and
Salish.
Quechua and
Aymara are
Native American language of
South America. In the past, much of the
ancient Near East also spoke such languages, such as
Sumerian,
Elamite,
Hurrian,
Urartian,
Hattic,
Gutian,
Lullubi, and
Kassite.
Agglutination is a typological feature and doesn't imply a linguistic relation, but there are some families of agglutinative languages. For example, the
Proto-Uralic language, the ancestor of
Uralic languages, was agglutinative, and most descended 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 can't be used as evidence of genetic relationship to other agglutinative languages.
Many separate languages developed this property through
convergent evolution. There seems to exist a preferred evolutionary direction from agglutinative synthetic languages to
fusional synthetic languages, and then to
non-synthetic languages, which in their turn evolve into
isolating languages and from there again into agglutinative synthetic languages. However, this is just a trend, and in itself a combination of the trend observable in
Grammaticalization theory and that of general linguistic attrition, especially word-final
apocope and
elision. This phenomenon is known as
language drift.
Some fictional and
constructed languages, such as
Esperanto,
Newspeak,
Klingon and
Black Speech are presented as agglutinative.
Further Information
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