polysynthetic language
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highly inflected language with many morphemes per word
Wikidata facts
- Subclass of
- synthetic language
- Part of
- morphological typology
Show 2 more facts
- topic's main category
- Category:Polysynthetic languages
- facet of
- morphological typology
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Encyclopedic overview
In linguistic typology, polysynthetic languages, formerly holophrastic languages, are highly synthetic languages, i.e., languages in which words are composed of many morphemes (word parts that have independent meaning but may or may not be able to stand alone). They are very highly inflected languages. Polysynthetic languages typically have long "sentence-words" such as the Yupik word tuntussuqatarniksaitengqiggtuq.
tuntussuqatarniksaitengqiggtuq tuntu reindeer
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “polysynthetic language” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.