Eurasia
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 four vowels are all separate suffixes, and the whole word means "[properties] of his/her sons". The nested possessive structure and expression of plurals is quite remarkable (note that Hungarian uses no genders).
Almost all
Austronesian languages, such as
Malay, and most
Philippine languages, also belong to this category, thus enabling them to form new words from simple base forms. The
Indonesian and Malay word
mempertanggungjawabkan is formed by adding active-voice, causative and transitive affixes to the compound verb
tanggung jawab, which means "to account for". In
Tagalog (and its standardised register,
Filipino),
nakakapágpabagabag ("that which is upsetting/disturbing") is formed from the root
bagabag ("upsetting" or "disquieting").
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.
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.
Americas
Agglutination is used very heavily in most
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. Conversely,
Navajo contains affixes for some uses, but overlays them in such unpredictable and inseparable ways that it is often referred to as a fusional language.
