Vowel harmony

In linguistics, a language is said to possess vowel harmony (also metaphony) when it has a phonological rule that requires all vowels in a word to belong to a single class. Such a language defines at least two contrasting classes of vowels based loosely on criteria like roundedness or frontness. Some vowels may be considered neutral, i. e. belonging to all classes.

Linguists typically distinguish vowel harmony from Umlaut, a similar phenomenon that also adjusts the front or back status of words and affixes. In Umlaut, at least historically, the place of articulation of a vowel in an affix used in inflection alters the vowels in the root it is attached to. In vowel harmony, the place of articulation of the (main) vowel in the root requires that the other vowels (in inflectional and derivational affixes) be adjusted to match it.

A related but much less widespread phenomenon is consonant harmony.

Vowel harmony appears in almost all Uralic and Altaic languages. Some have speculated that the vowel harmony of the northwestern Finno-Ugric languages influenced the phonological phenomenon of Umlaut that most of the living Germanic languages display.

Uralic languages

Finnish

In the Finnish language, there are three classes of vowels — front, back, and neutral. From vowel harmony, a feature of Finnish phonotactics, it follows that single words may not contain both front and back vowels, but all words may contain neutral vowels. The presence of back vowels in a word causes the word to take back vowel suffices, irrespective of possible neutral vowels. Otherwise, i.e. with front vowels or only neutral vowels, the word takes front vowel suffices.

For example

• kaura contains back vowels → kauralla
• kuori contains back vowels → kuorella
• sieni contains no back vowels → sienellä (not *sienella)
• käyrä contains no back vowels → käyrällä

As a consequence, Finnish speakers often have problems with pronouncing foreign words which do not obey vowel harmony. For example, olympia is pronounced olumpia. The position of some loans is unstandardized (e.g. chattailla/chättäillä ) or ill-standardized (e.g. polymeeri, autoritäärinen, which violate vowel harmony).

With respect to vowel harmony, compound words can be considered separate words. For example, syyskuu ("autumn month" i.e. September) has both u and y, and declines syys·kuu·ta (not *syyskuutä).

Hungarian

Hungarian, like its distant relative Finnish, has the same system of front, back, and intermediate (neutral) vowels. The only essential difference in classification is that the Hungarian does not observe the difference between Finnish 'ä' [æ] and 'e' [e] — the Hungarian neutral vowel 'e' [æ] is the same as the Finnish front vowel 'ä'. Intermediate or neutral vowels are usually counted as front ones, since they are formed that way, the difference being that neutral vowels can occur along with back vowels in Hungarian word bases (eg. répa carrot, kocsi car). Most of the words with neutral and back vowels may take only back suffixes (eg. répá|ban in a carrot, kocsi|ban in a car), but in some cases they can take either front or back suffixes (eg. farmer|ban or farmer|ben, in jeans). While most grammatical suffixes in Hungarian come in either one form (eg. -kor) or two forms (front and back, eg. -ban/-ben), some suffixes have an additional form for use with ö, ő, ü, and ű (eg. hoz/-hez/-höz), ie., the rounded vowels. See an example on basic numerals:

Altaic languages

Mongolian

Mongolian is similar. Front vowels in Mongolian are considered feminine, while back vowels are considered masculine.

Tatar

Tatar has no neutral vowels. The vowel é is found only in loanwords.

Kazakh

Kazakh's system of vowel harmony is primarily a front/back system, but there is also a system of rounding harmony that is not represented by the orthography, which strongly resembles the system in Kyrgyz.

Kyrgyz

Kyrgyz's system of vowel harmony is primarily a front/back system, but there is also a system of rounding harmony.

Turkish

Turkish has a 3-dimensional vowel harmony system, where vowels are characterised by three features: [±front], [±high], [±rounded].

Front/back harmony

Turkish has two classes of vowels — front and back. Vowel harmony states that words may not contain both front and back vowels. Therefore, most grammatical suffixes come in front and back forms, e.g. Türkiyede "in Turkey" but kapıda "at the door".

Rounding harmony

In addition, there is a secondary rule that i and ı tend to become ü and u respectively after rounded vowels, so certain suffixes have additional forms. This gives constructions such as Türkiyedir "it is Turkey", kapıdır "it is the door", but gündür "it is day", paltodur "it is the coat".

Exceptions

Compound words are considered separate words with respect to vowel harmony: vowels do not have to harmonize between members of the compound (thus forms like bu|gün "today" are permissible). In addition, vowel harmony does not apply for loanwords and some invariant suffixes (such as -iyor); there are also a few native Turkish words that do not follow the rule (such as anne "mother"). In such words suffixes harmonize with the final vowel; thus İstanbuldur "it is İstanbul".

Korean

Main Article: The Korean Language

There are three classes of vowels in Korean: positive, negative, and neutral. These categories loosely follow the front(positive) and mid (negative) vowels. Traditionally, Korean had strong vowel harmony; however, this rule is no longer observed strictly in modern Korean. In modern Korean, it is only applied in certain cases such as onomatopoeia, adjectives, adverbs, conjugation, and interjections. The vowel -(ŭ) is considered a partially neutral and a partially negative vowel. There are other traces of vowel harmony in modern Korean: many native Korean words tend to follow vowel harmony such as 사람 (saram), which means person, and 부엌 (Buŏk), which means kitchen.

Proponents of Korean as an Altaic language use the existence of vowel harmony in Korean to support their argument.

Other languages

This phenomenon has been documented in Telugu, several Bantu languages, Akan languages, Nez Perce, Coeur d’Alene, Yokutsan languages, Maiduan languages, Utian languages, Takelma, Coosan languages, Dusun languages, and Nilotic languages.

See also

• Consonant harmony
• Altaic languages
• Hungarian language
• Uralic languages
• Turkic languages
• Turkish language
• Korean language