American Indian languages American Indian heritage American Indians

Agglutinative Languages

Some Native American languages are described as "agglutinative" languages. This means that words in those languages are made up of multiple morphemes, or parts, each contributing a piece of the word's meaning.

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One example of agglutination would be the Cherokee word datsigowhtisgv'i which means "I was seeing something facing me." The prefix "da-" means the object is facing the speaker, "tsi-" is the conjugation for a first-person subject ("I"), "gowhti" is the root to see, "-sg-" means a verb has progressive or ongoing action, and "v'i" is past tense.

A language with words like this is sometimes also called polysynthetic, especially if speakers of the language can use many morphemes together in the same word. "Polysynthetic" and "agglutinative" are often used interchangeably when referring to Native American languages, but they are not actually synonyms. There is another type of polysynthetic language known as a fusional language, which can also have long words with many morphemes, but the morphemes do not each have a distinct meaning the way they do in agglutinative languages. Since fusional polysynthesis is rare in indigenous American languages, most polysynthetic languages in the Americas are also agglutinative.

Here are some examples of agglutinative Native American languages:

Abenaki	Achuar	Alabama	Aleut	Algonquin	Alsea	Alutiiq	Arabela
Arapaho	Arawak	Arikara	Ashaninka	Assiniboine	Atakapa	Aymara	Babine
Beaver	Caddo	Cayuga	Chehalis	Cherokee	Chinook	Chumash	Coeur d'Alene
Crow	Dakota	Guajiro	Guarani	Haida	Inuit	Karok	Kwakiutl
Lushootseed	Makah	Mohawk	Nootka	Oneida	Onondaga	Pawnee	Quileute
Salish	Seneca	Tlingit	Tsimshian	Tuscarora	Yanomamo	Yupik

Agglutinative Languages

Further Reading