Agglutinative Language - Examples

Examples

Examples of agglutinative languages include:

• Algonquian languages, namely Cree and Blackfoot
• Athabaskan languages, namely Navajo
• some resources believe Armenian and Persian are only Indoeuropean language which is agglutinative.
• Austronesian languages
• Basque language
• Bantu languages (see Ganda)
• Dravidian languages, most prominent of which are Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu and Tulu
• Eskimo–Aleut languages, namely Aleut, Inuktitut, and Yupik
• Igboid languages
• Japonic languages
• Kartvelian languages
• Korean language
• some Mesoamerican and native North American languages including Nahuatl, Huastec, and Salish
• Mongolic languages
• Muskogean languages
• Northeast and Northwest Caucasian languages
• some resources believe Persian language is the only Irani tong which is agglutinative
• Tungusic languages
• Turkic languages
• many Uralic languages, namely Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, and Sami languages
• Siouan languages, namely Lakota and Yuchi
• many Tibeto-Burman languages
• Quechua languages and Aymara

Many languages spoken by Ancient Near East peoples were agglutinative:

• Sumerian
• Elamite
• Hurrian
• Urartian
• Hattic
• Gutian
• Lullubi
• Kassite

Some constructed languages are agglutinative:

• Esperanto
• Quenya

Agglutination is a typological feature and does not imply a linguistic relation, but there are some families of agglutinative languages. For example, the Proto-Uralic language, the ancestor of Uralic languages, was agglutinative, and most descended languages inherit this feature. But since agglutination can arise in languages that previously had a non-agglutinative typology and it can be lost in languages that previously were agglutinative, agglutination as a typological trait cannot be used as evidence of genetic relationship to other agglutinative languages.

Many separate languages developed this property. There seems to exist a preferred evolutionary direction from agglutinative synthetic languages to fusional synthetic languages, and then to non-synthetic languages, which in their turn evolve into isolating languages and from there again into agglutinative synthetic languages. However, this is just a trend, and in itself a combination of the trend observable in Grammaticalization theory and that of general linguistic attrition, especially word-final apocope and elision. This phenomenon is known as language drift.

Sometimes, for different reasons, different aspects of a language do not evolve the same way or at the same speed. For example, the Latin nominal morphology was highly fusional, but the verbal morphology was even more so. They thus simplified at different speeds, and in Romance languages the verbal morphology is more complicated and fusional than the nominal one. In French, over the past centuries, the verbal conjugations went from fusional to more analytic while the nominal and pronominal morphologies grew from already isolating/vestigially fusional to partly agglutinative.