For example, the Spanish verb comer ("to eat") has the first-person singular preterite tense form comí ("I ate"); the single suffix -í represents both the features of first-person singular agreement and preterite tense, instead of having a separate affix for each feature.
[citation needed] Unusual for a Native North American language, Navajo is sometimes described as fusional because of its complex and inseparable verb morphology.
[6] Proto-Indo-European was fusional, but some of its descendants have shifted to a more analytic structure such as Modern English, Danish and Afrikaans or to agglutinative such as Persian and Armenian.
On the other hand, Finnish, its close relative, exhibits fewer fusional traits and thereby has stayed closer to the mainstream Uralic type.
However, Sámi languages, while also part of the Uralic family, have gained more fusionality than Finnish and Estonian since they involve consonant gradation but also vowel apophony.
Inflections in fusional languages tend to fall in two patterns, based on which part of speech they modify: declensions for nouns and adjectives, and conjugations for verbs.
For example, in French, the verbal suffix depends on the mood, tense and aspect of the verb, as well as on the person and number (but not the gender) of its subject.