Vowel harmony
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. 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.
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.
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 language 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, several Bantu languages, and almost all languages in Uralic languages as well as proposed Altaic language family.
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.
See also
