Agglutinative language

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An agglutinative language is a type of synthetic language with morphology that primarily uses agglutination. In an agglutinative language, words contain multiple morphemes concatenated together, but in such a manner that each word stem and affix can be isolated and identified as indicating a particular inflection or derivation (for example, passive suffix, causative suffix, etc. on verbs, plural suffix, accusative suffix, dative suffix, etc. on nouns.) However, this is not invariably the case. For example, Finnish is a typical agglutinative language but morphemes can be subject to (sometimes unpredictable) consonant alternations called consonant gradation.

Despite occasional outliers, agglutinative languages tend to have more easily deducible word meanings compared to fusional languages, which allow unpredictable modifications in either or both the phonetics or morphology of one or more morphemes within a word.