Agglutination

The terms agglutination (noun), agglutinate (verb and adjective), and agglutinative (adjective) are used, in different ways, in a variety of technical contexts. This page is concerned exclusively with the use of these terms in linguistics and related disciplines, and not at all with their use in, e.g., chemistry or immunology. About these latter you are advised to consult an appropriate textbook.

Note on pronunciation and etymology: agglutination is pronounced with the stress on the fourth syllable, while agglutinate, whether a verb or an adjective, and agglutinative have the stress on the second syllable. Agglutinate comes from the Latin verb agglutināre (‘to glue to’. ‘to glue together’), itself a compound of ad ('to') and gluten (‘glue’),

Agglutination in linguistics and related disciplines is the process by which words are formed through the combination (‘gluing together’) of smaller elements of language each of which has meaning in its own right. These linguistic elements – the technical term for them is morphemes - retain their meaning and undergo little, if any, change of pronunciation in the process of combination.

Agglutination is a feature of most, though not all, languages and may take many different forms. Here are three examples to illustrate the variety:

In English compound nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are often formed by agglutination. Thus the noun ‘thoughtfulness’ is a combination of ‘thought’, ‘-ful’, and ‘-ness’, the adjective ‘unspeakable’ is a combination of ‘un-’, ‘speak’, and ‘-able’; and the verb ‘disenfranchise’ is a combination of ‘dis-’, ‘en-’, and ‘franchise’.

Rather differently, what English expresses in a phrase of the form ‘personal pronoun-auxiliary verb-main verb’ Turkish expresses in a single word which agglutinates the various elements of meaning (morphemes). For example, the Turkish for ‘I did not understand’ is the single word anlamadım, a combination of the root anla- (‘understand’), the negative marker -m(a), the definite past marker -d(i), and the first person marker –(i)m.

Differently again, Arabic joins its word for ‘and’ (wa), the definite article (al), and some other words such as bi (‘by’, ‘in’, ‘at’, ‘of’ ), and li (‘to’, ‘for’, ‘so that’) to the immediately following word, and attaches certain pronouns (e.g., hu (‘him’, ‘of him‘/’his’), ha (‘her’, ’of her’/’hers’) and hum (‘them’, ‘of them’/’theirs’)) as suffixes to nouns and verbs. Thus what in English may be written as three or four words is written in Arabic as a single word, e.g., ‘And we killed him’ is written as waqatalnahu (i.e., wa-qatalna-hu) and ‘in her house’ is bibeitiha (i.e., bi-beiti-ha).

Languages in which agglutination plays a significant part may be described as agglutinative languages, of which Turkish and Japanese are perhaps the most often cited examples.