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Agglutinative language
An agglutinative language is a language where words are formed from a lexical root (substantive, verb, adjective, etc), holding the main signification, to which a certain amount of affixes (prefix, suffix and/or infix) corresponding to prepositions, pronouns, etc. are added, thus giving grammatical information. Those affixes are usually invariable and often deliver one piece of information at a time. An agglutinative language is supposed to be regular in terms of affixes.
To make things clearer, let’s have a look at Nahuatl, language of the Uto-Aztecan family in Mexico:
nimitste:tlapiyalti:lis: “I’ll make you keep things for people”, “I want you to be the guardian in other people’s interest”.
The sentence could be broken down as follows:
Ni: I (subject, 1st person singular)
mits: you (object, 2nd person singular)
te: people (human indefinite object)
tla: things (non-human indefinite object)
piya: keep (verbal root)
lti: make someone do something (causative or factitive)
li: do something for someone (applicative)
s: marker of the future tense
Note: the concepts of agglutinative and polysynthetic languages are controversial and their definitions are often considered as non-operational.