In linguistics, agglutination is a morphological process in which words are formed by stringing together morphemes (word parts), each of which corresponds to a single syntactic feature. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglutinative languages. For example, in the agglutinative Turkish, the word ("from your houses") consists of the morphemes ev-ler-i-n-iz-den. Agglutinative languages are often contrasted with isolating languages, in which words are monomorphemic, and fusional languages, in which words can be complex, but morphemes may correspond to multiple features.
Examples of agglutinative languages
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 the past, this assumption led linguists to propose the so-called Ural–Altaic language family, which included the Uralic and Turkic languages, as well as Mongolian, Korean, and Japanese. Contemporary linguistics views this proposal as controversial,Bernard Comrie: "Introduction", p. 7 and 9 in Comrie (1990).For instance, the Turkic language family is a well-established language family, as is each of the Uralic, Mongolian and Tungusic families. What is controversial, however, is whether or not these individual families are related as members of an even larger family. The possibility of an Altaic family, comprising Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungusic, is rather widely accepted, and some scholars would advocate increasing the size of this family by adding some or all of Uralic, Korean and Japanese.
For instance, the study of word order universals by Greenberg ("Some Universals of Grammar with Particular Reference to the Order of meaningful Elements", in J. H. Greenberg (ed.): Universals of language, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, 1963, pp. 73–112) showed that if a language has verb-final word order (i.e. if 'the man saw the woman' is expressed literally as 'the man the woman saw'), then it is highly probable that it will also have postpositions rather than prepositions (i.e. 'in the house' will be expressed as 'the house in') and that it will have genitives before the noun (i.e. the pattern 'cat's house' rather than 'house of cat'). Thus, if we find two languages that happen to share the features: verb-final word order, postpositions, prenominal genitives, then the co-occurrence of these features is not evidence for genetic relatedness. Many earlier attempts at establishing wide-ranging genetic relationships suffer precisely from failure to take this property of typological patterns into account. Thus the fact that Turkic languages, Mongolian languages, Tungusic languages, Korean and Japanese share all of these features is not evidence for their genetic relatedness (although there may, of course, be other similarities, not connected with recurrent typological patterns, that do establish genetic relatedness). and some refer to this as a language convergence instead.
Another consideration when evaluating the above proposal is that some languages that developed from agglutinative proto-languages lost their agglutinative features. For example, contemporary Estonian has shifted towards the fusional type.Lehečková (1983), p. 17:Flexivní typ je nejvýrazněji zastoupen v estonštině. Projevuje se kongruencí, nedostatkem posesivních sufixů, větší homonymií a synonymií a tolika alternacemi, že se dá mluvit o různých deklinacích. Koncovky jsou většinou fonologicky redukovány, takže ztrácejí slabičnou samostatnost. (It has also lost other features typical of the Uralic families, such as vowel harmony.)
Eurasia and Oceania
Examples of agglutinative languages include the Uralic languages, such as Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian. These have highly agglutinated expressions in daily usage, and most words are bisyllabic or longer. Grammatical information expressed by adpositions in Western Indo-European languages is typically found in suffixes.
Hungarian uses extensive agglutination in almost every part of it. The suffixes follow each other in special order based on the role of the suffix, and many can be heaped, one upon the other, resulting in words conveying complex meanings in compacted forms. An example is , where the root "fi(ú)-" means "son", the subsequent four vowels are all separate suffixes, and the whole word means "[plural properties] belong to his/her sons". The nested possessive structure and expression of plurals are quite remarkable (note that Hungarian uses no genders).
Though Indo-European languages are generally non-agglutinating, there are exceptions. Persian has some features of agglutination, making use of prefixes and suffixes attached to the stems of verbs and nouns. Persian is an SOV language, thus having a head-final phrase structure. Persian utilizes a noun root + plural suffix + case suffix + postposition suffix syntax similar to Turkish. For example, the phrase "/" means 'I was looking at their cars' lit. '(at their cars) (look) (I was doing)'. Breaking down the first word: (car) + (ها(ی (plural suffix) + شان (possessive suffix) + را (post-positional suffix), the language's agglutinative nature can be seen and the language is able to affix a given number of dependent morphemes to a root morpheme (in this example, car).
Almost all Austronesian languages, such as Malay, and most Philippine languages, also belong to this category, thus enabling them to form new words from simple base forms. The Indonesian and Malay word is formed by adding active-voice, causative and benefactive affixes to the compound verb , which means "to account for". In Tagalog (and its standardised register, Filipino), ("that which is upsetting/disturbing") is formed from the root ("upsetting" or "disquieting").
In East Asia, Korean is an agglutinating language. Its uses of '', '접사', and '어미' makes Korean agglutinate. They represent tense, time, number, causality, and honorific forms.
Japanese is also an agglutinating language, like Korean, adding information such as negation, passive voice, past tense, honorific degree and causality in the verb form. Common examples would be , which combines causative, passive or potential, and conditional conjugations to arrive at two meanings depending on context "if (subject) had been made to work..." and "if (subject) could make (object) work", and , which combines desire, negation, and past tense conjugations to mean "I/he/she/they did not want to eat".
Turkish, along with all other Turkic languages, is another agglutinating language: as an extreme example, the expression is pronounced as one word in Turkish, but it can be translated into English as "as if you were of those we would not be able to turn into a maker of unsuccessful ones". The "-siniz" refers to plural form of you with "-sin" being the singular form, the same way "-im" being "I" ("-im" means "my" not "I". The original editor must have mistaken it for "-yim". This second suffix is used as such "" meaning "May I go there" or "When I get there") and "-imiz" making it become "we". Similarly, this suffix means "our" and not "we".
Dravidian languages are agglutinative. For example, in Tamil, the word "" () means "and for the sake of those who cannot do that", composed of the morphemes அது (, "that") + -ஐ (, accusative marker) + பண்ணு (, "to do") + -அ (, infinitive ending) + முடி (, "to be possible") + -ஆத- (, negation marker) + அவர் (, "he") + -கள் (, plural marker) + -உக்கு (, dative marker) + ஆகு (, "to become", in this case "for the sake of") + -அ (, infinitive ending) + -உம் (, "and"). Another example is verb conjugation. In all Dravidian languages, verbal markers are used to convey tense and mood, and usually person (though Malayalam is an exception to the latter). For example, in Tamil, "" (, "I eat") is formed from the verb root (, "to eat") + the present tense marker () + the first-person singular suffix ().
Agglutination is also a notable feature of Basque. The conjugation of verbs, for example, is done by adding different prefixes or suffixes to the root of the verb: , which means "I bring them", is formed by da (indicates present tense), kar (root of the verb → bring), tza (indicates plural) and t (indicates subject, in this case, "I"). Another example would be the declension: = "In the house" where = house.
Americas
Agglutination is used very heavily in most Native American languages, such as the Inuit languages, Nahuatl, Mapudungun, Quechua, Tz'utujil, Kaqchikel, Cha'palaachi and Kʼicheʼ, where one word can contain enough morphemes to convey the meaning of what would be a complex sentence in other languages. Conversely, Navajo contains affixes for some uses, but overlays them in such unpredictable and inseparable ways that it is often referred to as a fusional language.
Slots
As noted above, it is a typical feature of agglutinative languages that there is a one-to-one correspondence between suffixes and syntactic categories. For example, a noun may have separate markers for number, case, possessive or conjunctive usage etc. The order of these affixes is fixed,There may exist exceptions in a language requiring some affixes go in an unexpected slot. so we may view any given noun or verb as a stem followed by several inflectional and derivational "slots", i.e. positions in which particular suffixes may occur, and/or preceded by several "slots" for prefixes. It is often the case that the most common instance of a given grammatical category is unmarked, i.e. the corresponding affix is empty.
The number of slots for a given part of speech can be surprisingly high. For example, a finite Korean verb has seven slots (the inner round brackets indicate parts of morphemes which may be omitted in some phonological environments):Nam-Kil Kim: Korean, p. 890–897 in Comrie (1990).
honorific: -(u)si ((으)시) is used when the speaker is honouring the subject of the sentence tense: -(e)ss (었) for completed (past) action or state; when this slot is empty, the tense is interpreted as present (The 'ss' is pronounced as 't' if it is placed behind a consonant. For example, -었어(ess-e) is pronounced as (esse), but -었다(ess-ta) is pronounced as (etta). Note that the same rule applies to all instances of the 'ss' ending.) experiential-contrastive aspect: -(e)ss (었) doubling the past tense marker means "the subject has had the experience described by the verb" modal: -keyss (겠) is used with first-person-subjects only for definite future and with second-or-third-person-subjects also for probable present or past formal: -(u)pni ((으)ㅂ니) expresses politeness to the hearer retrospective aspect: -te; (더) indicates that the speaker recollects what he observed in the past and reports in the present situation mood: -ta (다) for declarative, -kka (까) for interrogative, -la (라) for imperative, -ca (자) for propositive, -yo (요) for polite declarative and a large number of other possible mood markers
Moreover, passive and causative verbal forms can be derived by adding suffixes to the base, which could be seen as the null-th slot.
Even though some combinations of suffixes are not possible (e.g. only one of the aspect slots may be filled with a non-empty suffix), over 400 verb forms may be formed from a single base. Here are a few examples formed from the word root ga 'to go'; the numbers indicate which slots contain non-empty suffixes:
7 (imperative mood marker): imperative suffix -la (라) combines with the root ka- (가) to express imperative: () 'Go!' 7 (propositive mood marker): if we want to express proposition rather than command, the propositive mood marker is used: -ca (자) instead of -la (라): () 'Let's go!' 5 and 7: If the speaker wants to show respect for the hearer, he uses the politeness marker -(u)pni ((으)ㅂ니) (in slot 5); various mood markers may be simultaneously used (in slot 7, therefore after the politeness marker): () 'He is going.' () 'Is he going?'