In linguistics, agglutination is the morphological process of adding affixes to the base of a word. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglutinative languages. These languages are often contrasted with fusional languages and isolating languages. However, both fusional and isolating languages may use agglutination in the most-often-used constructs, and use agglutination heavily in certain contexts, such as word derivationoun This is the case in English, which is an isolating language, but has an agglutinated plural marker -(e)s and derived words such as shame·less·ness.