The term agglutinative language has a specific meaning in linguistics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutinative_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutin

The term agglutinative language has a specific meaning in linguistics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutinative_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutinative_language. Under this definition, IE languages (Russian, German), Arabic wouldn't be be considered as such. Typical examples are Turkic languages, Hungarian, Finnish, Korean, Japanese, most native American languages. And the language isolate Basque. But you are right in the sense that other languages do exhibit agglutinative aspects, usually in nouns (Bundesausbildungsförderungsgesetz). One giveaway is how words get marked for mood, person, and tense. In agglutinative languages the basic form almost never changes.