Agglutinative languages have generally one
grammatical category per affix while fusional languages combine multiple into one. 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". For example, the English word
antidisestablishmentarianism can be broken up into
anti- "against",
dis- "to deprive of",
establish (here referring to the formation of the Church of England),
-ment "the act of",
-arian "a person who", and
-ism "the ideology of". On the other hand, in a word such as
runs, the singular suffix
-s indicates the verb is both in third person and present tense, and cannot be further broken down into a "third person" morpheme and a "present tense" morpheme; this behavior is reminiscent of fusional languages. The term
agglutinative is sometimes incorrectly used as a synonym for
synthetic, but that term also includes fusional languages. The agglutinative and fusional languages are two ends of a continuum, with various languages falling more toward one end or the other. For example,
Japanese is generally agglutinative, but displays fusion in some nouns, such as , from
oto +
hito (originally
woto +
hito, "young, younger" + "person"), and Japanese verbs, adjectives, the copula, and their affixes undergo sound transformations. For example, affixed with and becomes . A synthetic language may use morphological agglutination combined with partial usage of fusional features, for example in its case system (e.g.,
German,
Dutch, and
Persian). Persian has some features of agglutination, making use of prefixes and suffixes attached to the stems of verbs and nouns. Persian is a
subject–object–verb (SOV) language, thus having a head-final phrase structure. Persian utilizes a noun root + plural suffix + case suffix + post-position suffix syntax similar to Turkish. For example the phrase "
xodróhāyešān-rā minegaristam/خودروهایشان را مینگریستم" meaning 'I was looking at their cars' lit. '(cars their at) (I was looking)'. Breaking down the first word:
خودرو xodró (car) +
ها(ی) hāye (plural suffix) +
شان šān (possessive suffix) +
را rā (post-positional suffix) becomes
خودروهایشان را/xodróhāyešān-rā. One can see its agglutinative nature and the fact that Persian is able to affix a given number of dependent morphemes to a root morpheme,
xodró (car).
Turkish is generally agglutinative, forming words in a similar manner:
araba (car) +
lar (plural) +
ın (possessive suffix, performing the same function as "of" in English) +
a (dative suffix, for the recipient of an action, like "to" in English) forms
arabalarına (). However, these suffixes depend upon
vowel harmony: doing the same to
ev ("house") forms
evlerine (to their houses). However, there are other features of the Turkish language that could be considered fusional, such as the suffixes for the simple present tense. This is the only tense where, rather than having a suffix did negation which can be included before the temporal suffix, there are two different suffixes – one for affirmative and one for negative. Giving examples using
sevmek ("to love" or "to like"): Agglutinative languages tend to have a high rate of affixes or morphemes per word, and to be very regular, in particular with very few
irregular verbs – for example, Japanese has
only two considered fully irregular, and only about a dozen others with only minor irregularity;
Luganda has only one (or two, depending on how "irregular" is defined); while in the
Quechua languages, all ordinary verbs are regular. Again, exceptions exist, such as in
Georgian. == Trends==