Inflected language

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In an inflected language, words change form according to grammatical function. For instance, affixes and stem changes on a verb may indicate number, person, time, or mood, or on a noun may indicate number, case, or grammatical gender. Words do not appear in a fundamental form (the word root) except in dictionaries and grammars.

Contrast isolating languages, which present the same information with word order and helper words more often than highly inflected languages do. Often the unmodified word root is a valid word by itself. However, distinguishing helper words from prefixes or suffixes in some languages (such as Japanese) can bring difficulty.

Examples of highly inflected languages include Latin, Greek, Czech and Russian. For instance, in Russian, which distinguishes between grammatical genders, the adjective stem odin, "one" can be inflected in the following ways:

  • odna tarelka - one plate (feminine)
  • odno derevo - one tree (neuter)
  • odin stol - one table (masculine)

On a continuum from highly inflected to highly isolating, most modern Indo-European languages languages are lie near inflected end. For example, Spanish, French, German, and Danish all inflect nouns and adjectives according to grammatical gender. These modern tongues make considerably less use of inflection than the archaic languages (such as Latin) from which they evolved.

In contrast, the Chinese language lies near the isolating end of the continuum.

Modern English is often cited as a language that does not use much inflection. This is true for common nouns: English nouns have no grammatical gender and case is represented by word order, although most nouns are inflected for number. But there are many exceptions among the pronouns: for example, who, whose, and whom are inflected nominative, genitive, and accusative forms of the same word. English has a great many irregular verbs (161), whose multiple forms must be memorized. An example is write: she writes (present tense), she wrote (past tense), and she had written (past perfect tense).

See Typological classification