12 Facts About Vowel harmony

In phonology, vowel harmony is an assimilatory process in which the vowels of a given domain – typically a phonological word – have to be members of the same natural class.

Vowel harmony is typically long distance, meaning that the affected vowels do not need to be immediately adjacent, and there can be intervening segments between the affected vowels.

Common phonological features that define the natural classes of vowels involved in vowel harmony include vowel backness, vowel height, nasalization, roundedness, and advanced and retracted tongue root.

The given domain of vowel harmony taking effect often spans across morpheme boundaries, and suffixes and prefixes will usually follow vowel harmony rules.

In other words, Vowel harmony refers to the assimilation of sounds that are not adjacent to each other.

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Finally, languages that do have vowel harmony often allow for lexical disharmony, or words with mixed sets of vowels even when an opaque neutral vowel is not involved.

Vowel harmony is often hypothesized to have existed in Proto-Uralic, though its original scope remains a matter of discussion.

Vowel harmony is found in Nganasan and is reconstructed for Proto-Samoyedic.

Vowel harmony is lost in the Northern and Southern dialects, as well as in the Surgut dialect of Eastern Khanty.

From vowel harmony it follows that the initial syllable of each single word controls the frontness or backness of the entire word.

Vowel harmony occurs to some degree in many other languages, such as.

Syllabic synVowel harmony was a process in the Proto-Slavic language ancestral to all modern Slavic languages.