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synthetic language
linguistics
synthetic language, any language in which syntactic relations within sentences are expressed by inflection (the change in the form of a word that indicates distinctions of tense, person, gender, number, mood, voice, and case) or by agglutination (word formation by means of morpheme, or word unit, clustering). Latin is an example of an inflected language; Hungarian and Finnish are examples of agglutinative languages.
Highly synthetic languages, in which a whole sentence may consist of a single word (usually a verb form) containing a large number of affixes are called polysynthetic. Inuit languages, along with many Indigenous North American languages, are polysynthetic. See also agglutination; inflection. Compare analytic language.
The Editors of Encyclopaedia BritannicaThis article was most recently revised and updated by Teagan Wolter.
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