Agglutination - Examples of Agglutinative Languages

Examples of Agglutinative Languages

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 all and any part of it. The suffixes follow each other in special order, and can be heaped in extreme amount, resulting words conveying complex meanings in very compact form. An example is fiaiéi where the root "fi-" means "son", the subsequent 4 vowels are all separate suffixes, and the whole word means " of his/her sons". The nested possessive structure and expression of plurals is quite remarkable (note that Hungarian uses no genders).

Agglutination is used very heavily in some Native American languages, such as the Inuit languages, Nahuatl, Quechua, Tz'utujil, Kaqchikel, Cha'palaachi and K'iche, where one word can contain enough morphemes to convey the meaning of what would be a complex sentence in other languages. Agglutination is also a common feature of Basque. The conjugations of verbs, for example, are done by adding different prefixes or suffixes to the root of the verb: dakartzat, which means 'I bring them', is formed by da (indicates present tense), kar (root of the verb ekarri-> bring), tza (indicates plural) and t (indicates subject, in this case, "I"). Another example would be the declination: Etxean = "In the house" where etxe = house.

Almost all of the Philippine languages also belong to this category. This enables them, especially Filipino, to form new words from simple base forms. An example is nakakapagpabagabag, which means causing someone or something to be upset and is formed from the root bagabag, which means upset/upsetting.

Japanese is also an agglutinating language, adding information such as negation, passive voice, past tense, honorific degree and causality in the verb form. Common examples would be hatarakaseraretara (働かせられたら), 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 tabetakunakatta (食べたくなかった), which combines desire, negation, and past tense conjugations to mean "(subject) did not want to eat".

Turkish is another agglutinating language: the expression Çekoslovakyalılaştıramadıklarımızdanmışçasına is pronounced as one word in Turkish, but it can be translated into English as "as if you were one of those whom we could not make resemble the Czechoslovakian people."

All Dravidian languages, including Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam and Tamil, are agglutinative. Agglutination is used to very high degrees both in formal written forms in Telugu (e.g. Suryodayam "surya = sun + Udayam = inception - Suryodayam = sun rise") and in colloquial spoken forms of the language (e.g. Himalayam "Hima = Snow + Alayam = Temple" - Himalayas"). Extreme degree of agglutination can be seen in historical Telugu literature like Manu Charitra, "Ata jani kanche bhoomisurudambara chumbi sirasara jhari patala muhurmuhur lutabhanga taranga mrudanga niswana sputanatananukula paripulla kalapi jalamul kataka charatkarenu kara kampitha salmu sita sailamun"

Esperanto is a constructed auxiliary language with highly regular grammar and agglutinative word morphology. See Esperanto vocabulary.

Whilst agglutination is characteristic of certain language families, it would be facile to jump to the conclusion that when several languages in similar geographic area are all agglutinative, they necessarily have to be related in the phylogenetic sense. In particular, such a conclusion formerly led linguists to propose the so-called Ural–Altaic language family which would (in the largest scope ever proposed) include Uralic and Turkic languages as well as Mongolian, Korean and Japanese. However, contemporary linguistics views this proposal as controversial.

On the other hand, it is also the case that some languages that have developed from agglutinative proto-languages have lost this feature. For example, contemporary Estonian, which is so closely related to Finnish that the two languages are mutually intelligible, has shifted towards the fusional type. (It has also lost other features typical of the Uralic families, such as vowel harmony.)