[eindiran]

The smallest unit in language that has meaning is called a morpheme. Some languages use relatively few morphemes-per-word like English: for example, the word "cats" can be broken into two morphemes -- "cat" and "-s". "Two" can't be broken down any further, so it has a 1-to-1 mapping between morphemes and words.

Other languages use a lot of morphemes-per-word. One strategy to create words from morphemes is called agglutination (meaning to glue things together). An agglutinative language takes all the morphemes that are going to go into a word, and with minimal or no changes, glues them together to form a word.

For example, the Yupik word "tuntussuqatarniksaitengqiggtuq" means "He had not yet said again that he was going to hunt reindeer". It is formed by taking the following morphemes and agglutinating them:

"tuntu-ssur-qatar-ni-ksaite-ngqiggte-uq"