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Linguistic typology
Morphological
Analytic Isolating Synthetic Fusional Agglutinative Polysynthetic Oligosynthetic
Morphosyntactic
Alignment Nominative–accusative Marked nominative Ergative–absolutive Split ergative Symmetrical voice Active–stative Tripartite Nominative–absolutive Direct-inverse Ditransitive/Monotransitive Secundative Indirective Zero-marking Dependent-marking Double-marking Head-marking Null-subject Syntactic pivot Theta role
Word order
VO languages Subject–verb–object Verb–subject–object Verb–object–subject OV languages Subject–object–verb Object–subject–verb Object–verb–subject V1 word order V2 word order OS word order Free word order Time–manner–place Place–manner–time
Lexicon
Color terms Numerals
v t e

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 individual word stems and affixes can be isolated and identified as to indicate a particular inflection or derivation, although this is not a rule: for example, Finnish is a typical agglutinative language, but morphemes are subject to (sometimes unpredictable) consonant alternations called consonant gradation.

Despite the 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 spelling of one or more morphemes within a word, usually resulting from a shortening of the word or to make pronunciation easier.