ABSTRACT
The languages of the world are often characterised by their position on a scale the extremes of which are described as isolating and agglutinating. In isolating languages, words are themselves the smallest units which carry meaning or grammatical information, while in agglutinating languages words have a high degree of internal structure, individual parts of the word having discrete functions with different combinations of the same elements being used to create different words. Spanish lies somewhere between these extremes, and is often described as being an inflecting language. Although it does have some words which are neither subdivisible into smaller functional units nor usable in combination with other elements, e.g. the adverb hoy, the vast majority of words have agglutinating characteristics.
