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.

For example, in the Finnish language, there are three classes of vowels:

Front vowels: (/ü/, /ö/, /æ/)
Back vowels: (/u/, /o/, /a/)
Neutral vowels: (/i/, /e/) [non-low unrounded vowels]

And the rule states that words may contain vowels from group 3 and/or vowels from either group 1 or group 2 (but not both 1 and 2). Thus, [tütö], [tütöti], and [tutoti] are permissible, but *[tutöti] and *[tüto] are not.

As a consequence Finns often have trouble pronouncing foreign loanwords which violate these rules. The word "Olympia" for example, tends to become "Olumpia" in their mouths.

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.

In Mongolian, the rule states:

Front vowels: (/e/, /ÃÂÃÂ¶/, /ÃÂÃÂ¼/)
Back vowels: (/a/, /o/, /u/)
Neutral vowel: (/i/)

In Tatar:

Front vowels: (/ÃÂÃÂ¤/, /e/, /i/, /ÃÂÃÂ¶/, /ÃÂÃÂ¼/)
Back vowels: (/a/, /ı/, /ÃÂÃÂ/, /o/, /u/)

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 the Ural-Altaic language family.

Compound words often violate this rule; for instance the Finnish month name "syyskuu" ("kuu" means month). In such words suffixes agree with the vowels in the last part: syyskuuta.

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 liquids, with [r] assimilating at a distance to [l] or vice versa.