What Is an Agglutinative Language? Definition and 5 Examples

38

Every language has a different way of conveying meaning. Some languages need a whole sentence to demonstrate an idea, while others can do it in one word (ever hear the word Muvaffakiyetsizleştiricileştiriveremeyebileceklerimizdenmişsinizcesine?). 

Those languages are called agglutinative languages, and there are more of them than you might think. Learn which languages are agglutinative, how you can tell, and whether you already speak one!

What is agglutination?

The word “agglutination” comes from the Latin agglutinare, meaning “to glue together.” That’s exactly what agglutinative languages do. They glue morphemes—the smallest unit of meaning in any language—onto a root word. 

As an example, look at the word “agglutination”:

• ag- (prefix): to
• glutin (root word): stick together
• -ation (suffix): the state of

When you put them all together, “agglutination” means “the state of sticking together.” In agglutinative languages, adding morphemes changes more than the meaning of the word. Each morpheme in an agglutinative language has its own meaning and grammatical function, allowing the word to function as an entire phrase or sentence.

Characteristics of agglutinative languages

Many languages have agglutinative traits, but they’re not all grouped into the same morphological category. Highly agglutinative languages typically share the following qualities:

• longer words with a high number of morphemes
• very few irregular verbs
• predictable word meanings
• morphemes only have one meaning and function
• many idioms to convey more complex meanings

Affixes in agglutinative languages can convey a word’s honorific (formality), verb tense, mood, number, person, specificity, or negation. When you add many different affixes to a word, you can create a specific meaning!

List of highly agglutinative languages

Over 300 million people speak agglutinative languages around the world. Most of them speak a language in the Ural-Altaic language family, named after the Altai and Ural Mountain regions between Europe and Asia. Each language has its own characteristics, but they all share agglutinative traits as well.

Turkish

Turkish is a common agglutinative language that changes the meaning and function of a word by adding morphemes. Take the longest Turkish word

Muvaffakiyetsizleştiricileştiriveremeyebileceklerimizdenmişsinizcesine, which means “As if you were one of those whom we may not be able to render unsuccessful.” It adds 17 affixes to the root word muvaffak (successful) to create a completely new—albeit uncommon—meaning!

Take a look at how gitmek, the Turkish word for “go,” changes verb tense and meaning based on the affixes added.

Japanese

Many language learners find that it’s not difficult to learn Japanese, thanks to its straightforward and predictable grammar patterns. When you understand the elements of an agglutinative language, and why Japanese is classified this way, you may want to learn Japanese yourself!

Different Japanese morphemes can add information to a word, including negation, a polite tone, a conditional tense, or an honorific degree. Notice how the verb “talk” changes meaning and grammatical function when we add additional affixes.

Korean

As one of the languages with the most words, Korean is one of the more challenging languages for English speakers to learn. But learning to speak Korean isn’t too tricky if you understand its agglutinated grammatical pattern. 

Korean affixes modifying words to indicate verb tense, time, and number. Like Japanese, agglutinative Korean affixes also add questions, adjectives, and negation.

Finnish

Like other agglutinative languages, Finnish expresses grammatical relationships by adding affixes to a root word. It has 17 inflectional cases (as opposed to four cases in English, or seven cases in Turkish), which is why Finnish may be a bit more difficult for learners to predict a grammatical pattern. 

Finnish affixes can indicate possession, prepositions, verb tense, and more. See how the Finnish word tuoli (chair) changes when you add varying affixes.

Hungarian

Hungarian, another agglutinative language, also has many longer words composed of a root word and several suffixes. You can see how many affixes change one of the longest recorded Hungarian words:

• Megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért (for your continued behavior of being impossible to desecrate) from the root word szent (holy)

Hungarian grammar uses affixes to add specificity, verb tense, mood, and number. See how changing the preposition and plurality of “teacher” in English adds different affixes to Hungarian words.

Additional agglutinative languages

While Turkish, Japanese, Korean, Finnish, and Hungarian are the most common agglutinating languages, they’re not the only ones in this category. Additional agglutinative languages include:

• Basque
• Estonian
• Indonesian
• Inuit languages
• Tamil
• Malayalam
• Mapudungun
• Mongolian
• Nahuatl
• Quechua
• Swahili
• Tz’utujil

Languages like Persian (Farsi), Tagalog, and Navajo also have agglutinative elements. Some parts of their vocabularies use affixes to change the meaning of a word, while other parts rely on word order and modifiers to make the meaning clear.

Analytical and synthetic languages

Agglutinated languages aren’t the only type of morphological typology. Languages fall into two major morphological groups: analytic and synthetic languages. These names refer to how a language uses morphemes to convey meaning.

Analytic languages

Analytic languages have a low number of morphemes per word, meaning that they consist of many short words (unlike agglutinative languages, which have longer words with more morphemes). They rely on word order in a sentence and auxiliary words to clarify meaning, rather than affixes. 

Chinese and Vietnamese fall into a subset category of analytic languages called isolating languages. They have limited derivational morphology, so they don’t use many affixes to change the meaning of a word.

Synthetic languages

Synthetic languages use inflection for meaning by modifying words. These changes may alter a word’s tense, voice, person, number, gender, or specificity. Agglutinative languages fall into this category, along with fusional languages (which “fuse” word elements together).

Greek and Latin are synthetic languages, as are the majority of languages derived from them (including Romance languages like Spanish and French). German and Arabic are also synthetic, as are Russian and most Slavic languages. 

Is English an agglutinative language?

You may have noticed that English is missing on those lists, and there’s a reason. To start, modern English is a Germanic language, meaning that it has many synthetic elements like German and other Germanic languages. It also includes influences from Latin and Greek, including many common prefixes and suffixes. (That’s where we get the famously long word “antidisestablishmentarianism!”)

So does that mean English is fusional? Not exactly. English is not agglutinative, and it’s not entirely fusional (although Old English was a highly fusional language). Because of the importance of word order in English, smaller auxiliary words, and lack of inflectional endings, linguists place English more in the analytic category with Chinese and Vietnamese. 

But English isn’t entirely analytic, either. Thanks to its many influences from Old English, German, French, Latin, Greek, and pre-Roman Celtic languages, it has many irregular grammar rules that make learning English more challenging than some agglutinative languages.

Are agglutinative languages hard to learn?

Some agglutinative languages are harder to learn than others, and most aren’t as easy to learn for English speakers. Turkish, Finnish, and Hungarian fall into Category III of the language difficulty ratings, meaning that they would take around 44 weeks (or 1,100 hours of practice) to become proficient. Japanese and Korean are in Category IV, which means learners practice these languages for 88 weeks or 2,200 hours to achieve proficiency.

Some agglutinative languages aren’t as challenging for English learners. Category II agglutinative languages like Indonesian, Malay, and Swahili take around 36 weeks (900 hours) of practice. But with Rosetta Stone tools like the TruAccent speech recognition engine and Dynamic Immersion method, you’ll find that the learning process is straightforward and enjoyable.