Agglutinative language in the context of Japanese grammar

The Altaic (/ælˈteɪ.ɪk/ ) languages are a sprachbund and rejected proposed language family comprising the Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic language families, with some linguists having included the Koreanic and Japonic families. The proposed Altaic language family is no longer considered valid, as linguistic similarities among Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic languages are better explained by areal convergence within a convergence zone rather than by a shared genetic lineage, a phenomenon observed cross-linguistically in diverse language families worldwide.

These languages share agglutinative morphology, head-final word order and some vocabulary. The once-popular theory attributing these similarities to a common ancestry has long been rejected by most comparative linguists in favor of language contact, although it continues to be supported by a small but stable scholarly minority. Like the Uralic language family, which is named after the Ural Mountains, the group is named after the Altai mountain range in the center of Asia.

Burmese (မြန်မာဘာသာစကား (or) ဗမာဘာသာစကား) is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Myanmar, where it is the official language, lingua franca, and the native language of the Bamar, the country's largest ethnic group. The Constitution of Myanmar officially refers to it as the Myanmar language in English, though most English speakers continue to refer to the language as Burmese, after Burma—a name with co-official status until 1989 (see Names of Myanmar). Burmese is the most widely spoken language in the country, where it serves as the lingua franca. In 2019, Burmese was spoken by 42.9 million people globally, including by 32.9 million speakers as a first language and 10 million as a second language. A 2023 World Bank survey found that 80% of the country's population speaks Burmese. Burmese dialects are also spoken by some of the indigenous tribes in Bangladesh's Chittagong Hill Tracts, China's Yunnan province, and India's northeastern states, as well as by Burmese diaspora.

Burmese is a tonal, pitch-register, and syllable-timed language, largely monosyllabic and agglutinative with a subject–object–verb word order. Burmese is distinguished from other major Southeast Asian languages by its extensive case marking system and rich morphological inventory. It is a member of the Lolo-Burmese grouping of the Sino-Tibetan language family. The Burmese alphabet ultimately descends from a Brahmic script, either the Kadamba or Pallava alphabet.

Filipino (English: /ˌfɪlɪˈpiːnoʊ/ FIL-ih-PEE-noh; Wikang Filipino [ˈwikɐŋ filiˈpino]) is the national language of the Philippines, the main lingua franca, and one of the two official languages of the country, along with English. It is a de facto standardized form of the Tagalog language, as spoken and written in Metro Manila and in other urban centers of the archipelago. The 1987 Constitution mandates that Filipino be further enriched and developed by the other languages of the Philippines.

Filipino, like other Austronesian languages, commonly uses verb-subject-object order, but can also use subject-verb-object order. Filipino follows the trigger system of morphosyntactic alignment that is common among Philippine languages. It has head-initial directionality. It is an agglutinative language but can also display inflection. It is not a tonal language and can be considered a pitch-accent language and a syllable-timed language. It has nine basic parts of speech.

Finnish (endonym: suomi [ˈsuo̯mi] or suomen kieli [ˈsuo̯meŋ ˈkie̯li]) is a Finnic language of the Uralic language family, spoken by the majority of the population in Finland and by ethnic Finns outside of Finland. Finnish is one of the two official languages of Finland, alongside Swedish. In Sweden, both Finnish and Meänkieli (which has significant mutual intelligibility with Finnish) are official minority languages. Kven, which like Meänkieli is mutually intelligible with Finnish, is spoken in the Norwegian counties of Troms and Finnmark by a minority of Finnish descent.

Finnish is typologically agglutinative and uses almost exclusively suffixal affixation. Nouns, adjectives, pronouns, numerals and verbs are inflected depending on their role in the sentence. Sentences are normally formed with subject–verb–object word order, although the extensive use of inflection allows them to be ordered differently. Word order variations are often reserved for differences in information structure. Finnish orthography uses a Latin-script alphabet derived from the Swedish alphabet, and is phonemic to a great extent. Vowel length and consonant length are distinguished, and there are a range of diphthongs, although vowel harmony limits which diphthongs are possible.

Fusional languages or inflected languages are a type of synthetic language, distinguished from agglutinative languages by their tendency to use single inflectional morphemes to denote multiple grammatical, syntactic, or semantic features.

For example, the Spanish verb comer ("to eat") has the active first-person singular indicative preterite tense form comí ("I ate") where just one suffix, -í, denotes the intersection of the active voice, the first person, the singular number, the indicative mood, and preterite (which is the combination of the past tense and perfective aspect), instead of having a separate affix for each feature.

Kazakh is a Turkic language of the Kipchak branch spoken in Central Asia by the Kazakhs. It is closely related to Nogai, Kyrgyz and Karakalpak. It is the official language of Kazakhstan, and has official status in the Altai Republic of Russia. It is also a minority language in the Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture in Xinjiang, China, and in the Bayan-Ölgii Province of western Mongolia. The language is also spoken by many ethnic Kazakhs throughout the former Soviet Union (some 472,000 in Russia according to the 2010 Russian census), Germany, and Turkey.

Like other Turkic languages, Kazakh is an agglutinative language and employs vowel harmony. Kazakh builds words by adding suffixes one after another to the word stem, with each suffix expressing only one unique meaning and following a fixed sequence. Ethnologue recognizes three mutually intelligible dialect groups: Northeastern Kazakh—the most widely spoken variety, which also serves as the basis for the official language—Southern Kazakh, and Western Kazakh. The language shares a degree of mutual intelligibility with the closely related Karakalpak language while its Western dialects maintain limited mutual intelligibility with the Altai languages.

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 evlerinizden ("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.

Morphological typology is a way of classifying the languages of the world that groups languages according to their common morphological structures. The field organizes languages on the basis of how those languages form words by combining morphemes. Analytic languages contain very little inflection, instead relying on features like word order and auxiliary words to convey meaning. Synthetic languages, ones that are not analytic, are divided into two categories: agglutinative and fusional languages. Agglutinative languages rely primarily on discrete particles (prefixes, suffixes, and infixes) for inflection, while fusional languages "fuse" inflectional categories together, often allowing one word ending to contain several categories, such that the original root can be difficult to extract. A further subcategory of agglutinative languages are polysynthetic languages, which take agglutination to a higher level by constructing entire sentences, including nouns, as one word.

Analytic, fusional, and agglutinative languages can all be found in many regions of the world. However, each category is dominant in some families and regions and essentially nonexistent in others. Analytic languages encompass the Sino-Tibetan family, including Chinese, many languages in Southeast Asia, the Pacific, and West Africa, and a few of the Germanic languages. Fusional languages encompass most of the Indo-European family—for example, French, Russian, and Hindi—as well as the Semitic family and a few members of the Uralic family. Most of the world's languages, however, are agglutinative, including the Turkic, Japonic, Dravidian, and Bantu languages and most families in the Americas, Australia, the Caucasus, and non-Slavic Russia. Constructed languages take a variety of morphological alignments.

A synthetic language is a language that is characterized by denoting syntactic relationships between words via inflection or agglutination. Synthetic languages are statistically characterized by a higher morpheme-to-word ratio relative to analytic languages.

Fusional languages favor inflection and agglutinative languages favor agglutination. Further divisions include polysynthetic languages (most belonging to an agglutinative-polysynthetic subtype, although Navajo and other Athabaskan languages are often classified as belonging to a fusional subtype) and oligosynthetic languages (only found in constructed languages). In contrast, rule-wise, the analytic languages rely more on auxiliary verbs and word order to denote syntactic relationship between words.

The Yakut language (/jəˈkuːt/ yə-KOOT), also known as the Sakha language (/səˈxɑː/ sə-KHAH) or Yakutian, is a Siberian Turkic language spoken by around 450,000 native speakers—primarily by ethnic Yakuts. It is one of the official languages of the Sakha Republic, a republic in the Russian Federation.

The Yakut language has a large number of loanwords of Mongolic origin, a layer of vocabulary of unclear origin, as well as numerous recent borrowings from Russian. Like other Turkic languages, Yakut is an agglutinative language and features vowel harmony.

In linguistics, a marker is a free or bound morpheme that indicates the grammatical function of the marked word, phrase, or sentence. Most characteristically, markers occur as clitics or inflectional affixes. In analytic languages and agglutinative languages, markers are generally easily distinguished. In fusional languages and polysynthetic languages, this is often not the case. For example, in Latin, a highly fusional language, the word amō ("I love") is marked by suffix -ō for indicative mood, active voice, first person, singular, present tense. Analytic languages tend to have a relatively limited number of markers.

Markers should be distinguished from the linguistic concept of markedness. An unmarked form is the basic "neutral" form of a word, typically used as its dictionary lemma, such as—in English—for nouns the singular (e.g. cat versus cats), and for verbs the infinitive (e.g. to eat versus eats, ate and eaten). Unmarked forms (e.g. the nominative case in many languages) tend to be less likely to have markers, but this is not true for all languages (compare Latin). Conversely, a marked form may happen to have a zero affix, like the genitive plural of some nouns in Russian (e.g. сапо́г). In some languages, the same forms of a marker have multiple functions, such as when used in different cases or declensions (for example -īs in Latin).

Sotho (/ˈsuːtuː/), also known as Sesotho (/sɪˈsuːtuː, sə-/), Southern Sotho, or Sesotho sa Borwa is a Southern Bantu language spoken in Lesotho as its national language and South Africa where it is an official language.

Like all Bantu languages, Sesotho is an agglutinative language that uses numerous affixes and derivational and inflexional rules to build complete words.

The Altaic (/ælˈteɪ.ɪk/ ) languages are a sprachbund and proposed language family comprising the Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic language families, with some linguists having included the Koreanic and Japonic families. The proposed Altaic language family is no longer considered valid by the majority of scholars, as linguistic similarities among Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic languages appear to be better explained by areal convergence within a convergence zone rather than by a shared genetic lineage, a phenomenon observed cross-linguistically in diverse language families worldwide. However, a sizeable number of linguists still support the language family classification, citing morphological and grammatical similarities amongst the constituent languages.

These languages share agglutinative morphology, head-final word order and some vocabulary. The once-popular theory attributing these similarities to a common ancestry has been questioned by most comparative linguists in favor of language contact, although it continues to be supported by a smaller, yet stable scholarly minority. Like the Uralic language family, which is named after the Ural Mountains, the group is named after the Altai mountain range in the center of Asia.