Vowel harmony

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In linguistics, a language exhibiting vowel harmony has a phonological rule that requires all vowels in a word to belong to a single class of vowels. The most common types of vowel harmony rules are rules requiring all vowels to be either rounded or unrounded, or requiring all vowels to be either front or back vowels, but not both.

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 front or back position of a vowel in an affix used in inflection alters the vowels in the root it is attached to. In vowel harmony, the position of the vowel of the root requires that the vowel of the affix be adjusted to match it.

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.

Contents

1 Uralic languages

1.1 Finnish
1.2 Hungarian

2 Altaic languages

2.1 Mongolian
2.2 Tatar
2.3 Turkish

3 Other languages

4 Consonant harmony

5 See also

Uralic languages

Finnish

Front	ä	ö	y
Back	a	o	u
Neutral	e	i

In the Finnish language, there are three classes of vowels -- front, back, and neutral. Vowel harmony states that words may not contain both front and back vowels, but neutral vowels may be combined with either group. For example, aaltoileva contains only neutral vowels and back vowels, while äidillä contains only front vowels and neutral vowels.

As a consequence, Finns often have trouble pronouncing foreign words which do not contain vowel harmony.

Compound words often violate this rule, such as the Finnish month name syyskuu (September, literally "autumn-month"). In such words suffixes agree with the vowels in the last part: syys·kuu·ta.

Hungarian

Front, unrounded (= the neutral ones)	e	é	i	í
Front, rounded	ö	ő	ü	ű
Back	a	á	o	ó	u	ú

Hungarian, like its distant relative Finnish, has front, back, and intermediate (neutral) vowels. 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:

		-kor (at, for time)	-ban/-ben (in)	-hoz/-hez/-höz (to)
Back	hat (6), nyolc (8), három (3)	-kor	-ban	-hoz
Front, unrounded (that is, the neutral ones)	egy (1), négy (4), kilenc (9)	-kor	-ben	-hez
Front, rounded	öt (5), kettő (2)	-kor	-ben	-höz

Altaic languages

Mongolian

Feminine (front)	e	ö	ü
Masculine (back)	a	o	u
Neutral	i

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

Tatar

Front	ä	e	i	ö	ü
Back	a	ı	í	o	u	é

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

Turkish

Front	e	i	ö	ü
Back	a	ı	o	u

Turkish has two classes of vowels -- front and back. Vowel harmony states that words may not contain both front and back vowels.

Compound words often violate this rule. In such words suffixes agree with the vowels in the last part. Also the rule does not hold applicable for loan words, one-syllable words and some suffixes (such as -iyor).

Other languages

Other languages, such as Middle Korean, have more arbitrary class-membership rules. (In Modern Korean, vowel harmony is no longer strictly observed except in a few special cases.)

This phenomenon has been documented in Telugu and several Bantu languages.

Consonant harmony

The counterpart of vowel harmony, consonant harmony, is less widespread. Most commonly, consonant harmony requires all the sibilants of the word to belong either to the anterior class (s-like sounds) or the nonanterior class (sh-like sounds). Such patterns are found in Navajo, Kinyarwanda, and elsewhere. Various Austronesian languages exhibit consonant harmony among the liquid consonants, with [r] assimilating at a distance to [l] or vice versa. Likewise, in Sanskrit, [n] is retroflexed to [ṇ] if certain consonants precede it in the same word, even at a distance.

It is to be mentioned that the opposite of consonant harmony, ie., dissimilation, is much more widespread among languages. For example, in Latin, from medidies (the middle of the day, ie. noon) became meridies, so the consonants should differ and thus the word can be pronounced more easily.