Digital classifiers, evidentials, inflected languages, polysynthetic languages … all these terms may seem very barbaric for Internet users who are not familiar with the subtleties of linguistics! You will find here a basic glossary that will help you find your way in this jargon.

Affix
An affix refers to a morpheme combined to a root to add a lexical or grammatical piece of information. For further information

Numerical classifier
In many languages, it’s impossible to directly state numbered items and a “numerical classifier” has to be added to numbers. For instance, in Chinese, we have:
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Utterance
There are many ways to define utterance, a concept that is often used in linguistics.
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Evidentials
An evidential is an indication of the speaker’s “opinion” in an utterance. It is often used to mark the degree of proof/probability of the action.
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Inflections
An inflection is when a word is modified for grammatical reasons (without changing categories, contrary to a derivation).
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Agglutinative language
An agglutinative language is a language where words are formed from a lexical root…
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Isolating language
A language is isolating or analytic when there are no inflections…
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Inflecting language
An inflecting language is language where the form of words change for grammatical reasons…
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Polysynthetic language
A polysynthetic language is a language where words are made with lexical morphemes …
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Morpheme
In theory, a morpheme is the smallest contrastive unit of grammar in a given language…
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Morphology
Morphology is the study of the structure of words in a given language…
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Phoneme
Each language has a set of sounds and its own phonetic system…
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Phonetics
Phonetics is the the study of sounds used in verbal communication…
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Phonology
Phonology, contrary to phonetics, focuses on the way each language organizes its own phonetic system with units called phonemes.

Root
A root is a lexical morpheme bearing the main signification of a word, when said word is made of several morphemes…
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Syntax
Syntax is the study of how different words of a language are organized to produce an utterance.