Is Japanese really an agglutinative language?


In the linguistics topic of language typology, Japanese is often included in
lists of [agglutinative (or agglutinating)
languages](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutinative_language), but when
learning or reading about Japanese grammar exclusively this is rarely if ever
mentioned. Other examples of agglutinative languages are Turkish, Finnish,
Hungarian, and Basque.

Languages always considered
[agglutinative](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutination) usually talk about
things like lots of case inflections on nouns or lots of "slots" for various
infixes and affixes in the potentially long endings of both verbs and nouns.
Japanese in contrast usually talks about lots of particles and lots of verb
endings only.

So is it true that Japanese is an agglutinative language and how should we
regard this in relation to how we normally discuss Japanese grammar?




Agglutinative languages are somewhat harder to understand than other
categories. it's easy to see what the difference between synthetic fusional
languages (like Latin or Russian) to isolating ones (such as Chinese or
English): in isolating languages you only have words mixed with each other in
various ways, but no morphology (or at least not very much of it, since no
language is pure).

But why shouldn't we count agglutinative languages as isolating? If they just
add suffixes (or prefixes, to be inclusive: Bantu languages such as Swahili
and Zulu use prefixes more than suffixes for indicating things). You can treat
every suffix as yet another word and then they're all just a few words bunched
together, no different than in Chinese.

But the truth is that agglutinative particles aren't words. Unlike
"pre"-positions, they can't stand alone and they can't put themselves wantonly
in both sides of words ("understand" vs "stand under") or entirely removed
from the word they describe ("Which city do you live in?"). In fact,
agglutinative particles are so tied to the "full" words they are attached to
that they really are, for all intents and purposes, affixes. In most
agglutinative languages, they are indeed written as prefixes and suffixes
(i.e. there's no space between them and the words they describe) but in
Japanese romanization (especially when targeted toward foreigners) they are
not. This is mostly due to a westernized perception of Japanese in my opinion.

For the record, the modern language most similar to Korean, which is given as
an example for slot, is most probably Japanese. They both have a verb
conjugation strategy which can be explained through slots (though it's
arguably simpler in Japanese than in Korean), but you won't find the word
"slots" used in textbooks in neither of these languages (at least not the ones
I've read).

Actually, "slots" is just a more disciplined way to view what is essentially a
standard order for suffixes. In Japanese, as well as in Korean, certain things
have to come before others. If your verb specifies negation for instance, it
should definitely come after volition (～たい), but also before the past tense
marker (～た). If you fulfill every possible category you can also count slots
in Japanese, but it's less useful than in Korean, since in Korean some
suffixes that are not attached directly to each other still need to come
together in some of the cases, so it might make talking about slots more
helpful, even for students (but it isn't - most Korean textbooks I've read are
quite bad at making things simple :/)

Deep inside, Korean uses [verbal
bases](http://www.tufs.ac.jp/ts/personal/choes/korean/base/Ebase.html), just
like Japanese, and each suffix is attached to one of these verbal bases and
can be conjugated to any of them (so the next suffix could be attached to it).
The same thing can be said about Japanese, where the auxiliary verb だす is
attached to the I-base of verbs (e.g. kak **i** for kaku) and the auxiliary
verb あげる can only be attached to the TE-form. They both have further bases of
their own, of course. Some other suffixes (such as ～ない and ～たい) behave more
like i-adjectives, but [as we've seen
before](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/1008/why-does-japanese-
have-two-kinds-of-adjectives-i-adjectives-and-na-adjectives), i-adjectives
are, in fact, verbs.

Case inflections on noun are actually quite rare. As far as I know, the only
major (or perhaps we should say: commonly mentioned) agglutinative languages
to ever have cases are Finnish and Estonian. Some languages, such as Turkish,
Hungarian or even Japanese are claimed to have cases, since there are
particles that mark things like direct object (accusative) or the instrument
of a verb (instrumental). These should only be called cases, however, if they
are used for [noun
agreement](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agreement_%28linguistics%29),
especially with adjectives agreeing to their nouns. In Latin they do (compare
De Nov **o** Mund **o** _about the new world_ to Nov **i** Mund **i** _of the
new world_ ), and in Finnish [they also
do](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_grammar#Adjectives). Japanese is
obviously different, but the same can be said for most other agglutinative
languages.

In fact, there is probably no single grammatical category (be it case, gender,
tense, person, number, volition, negation or whatever) that is done through
agglutinative suffixes in all agglutinative languages. Being an agglutinative
language has nothing to do with **what** is expressed through agglutination,
but rather with **how** it is expressed.

