Vowel harmony
Two important features that characterise Kalmyk are agglutination and vowel harmony. In an agglutinative language, words are formed by adding suffixes to existing words, called stem words or root words. Prefixes, however, are not common in Mongolic. Vowel harmony refers to the agreement between the vowels in the root of a word and the vowels in the word's suffix or suffixes. Other features include the absence of grammatical gender (with its distinctions of masculine, feminine, and neuter).