Agglutination in Linguistics

the formation of grammatical structures and derived words by the addition of affixes to a root or stem. Each affix has a unique grammatical meaning and function. Affixes are discrete; they do not blend with the root or other affixes in a word. But depending on the phonological properties of the root word, vowels of affixes can undergo phonetic changes; consonants can change at morpheme boundaries, but only in accordance with the phonetic peculiarities of the given language. This is observed, for instance, in most Altaic and Finno-Ugric languages.

Agglutinative languages can be recognized by their morphological characteristic—agglutination. The Turkmen word ishchilerimizden (“from our workers”) consists of the root ish (work); the word-building affix chi, which creates ishchi (worker); and the three inflectional affixes which add plural number (-ler), first-person plural possession (-imiz), and the ablative case (-den).