Agglutination

In linguistics, agglutination is the morphological process of adding affixes to the bases of a words, making the original word more descriptive. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglutinative languages. This process is often contrasted with fusional languages.

Agglutination is used very heavily in some Native American languages, such as Inuktitut, where a word can be aggultinate so many times that the information the word contains is equivalent to an entire sentence. An example of agglutination in the English language is the word "antidisestablishmentarianism", where the baseword is "establish".

One observable difference between an agglutinated word and a multi-word sentence is that the speaker cannot systematically break down in the middle of an agglutinated word, as in "antidis...uh...establishmentarianism"; whereas word break is common in multi-word sentence, such as "Against the establishment...uh...theory". Also, native speakers untrained in linguistics cannot usually break down an agglutinated word into its components. This is especially true in Native American agglutinated languages.

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