What morphology studies
Morphology is the branch of grammar concerned with the structure of the word and its forms. It studies how word forms are built from a stem and affixes, and how words are grouped into parts of speech. Uzbek is an agglutinative language: grammatical meanings are expressed by affixes that attach to the stem one after another in a fixed order.
Stem and affix
The stem is the part of the word that carries the core meaning (kitob — “book”). Affixes add grammatical meaning to it: kitob-lar (plural), kitob-im (my), kitob-lar-im-da (in my books). In Uzbek, affixes almost always follow the stem and, rather than fusing with it, attach one layer after another.
kitob → kitoblar → kitoblarim → kitoblarimda
It is precisely this strict “stem plus affixes” order that makes Uzbek morphology predictable: once you know the set of affixes and their sequence, you can build and parse almost any word form. In the rest of this section we go part of speech by part of speech, starting with the noun.