Linguata
Vowel harmony in Turkish
Vowel harmony is an important characteristic of languages belonging to the Turkic language family. It is based on the way vowels are produced: words of Turkic origin as opposed to words taken over from other languages are composed of either front or back, rounded or unrounded vowels, and any ‘bits’ added to these words usually have to modify their vowels accordingly. It is a source of confusion to English speakers at first. It can be helpful to get an approximate theoretical understanding first then develop an intuitive understanding by listening to and repeating spoken examples.
Vowel harmony is driven by two broad aspects of vowel formation, tongue position and mouth shape. The first of these, tongue position, enables the vowels to be grouped into two sets of four, front and back, according to the approximate position of the tongue within the mouth cavity. Mouth shape is more obvious, being directly observable, and allows vowels to be grouped as ‘rounded’ or ‘non-rounded’ according to whether or not the lips are rounded and protruded.
Front and Back Vowels
The front vowels are e, i, ö, and ü. Approximate English vowel sounds as follows:
e as in ‘test’
i as in ‘bit’
ö as in ‘hurt’ without any ‘r’ sound
ü as in ‘mew’, but short; like German ü.
These sounds feel as though they originate towards the front of the mouth, beneath the hard palate (hence palatal vowels). Native words like el (hand) and ev (house) ‘force’ their suffixes to use similar front vowels, giving rise to an expression such as evlerimde (in my houses), where –ler is the plural suffix, -im is the possessive (my) and –de is the locative (in).
The back vowels are a, ı, o, and u.
a as the u in ‘bus’
ı as the ‘swallowed’ second e in ‘better’
o as in ‘lot’
u as in ‘put’
These feel as though they take shape further back than their front equivalents, below the soft palate (hence velar vowels). Suffixes added on to a word like oda (room) which ends in a back vowel, have to adapt their vowels accordingly: at (horse) results in atlarıma (to my horses), where -lar is the plural suffix, -ım is the possessive, and –a indicates movement towards.
Trying moving between e→a, i→ı, ö→o and ü→u to get a sense of the difference between front and back vowels. Listen to expressions which show this aspect of vowel harmony in operation:
Teşekkür ederim – Thanks! – Hoşça kalın – Goodbye! illustrate three out of the four front and back vowels respectively. (A first few words. 1)
Rounded and Unrounded Vowels
Of the front vowels e, i, ö, and ü the first two are unrounded, and the two with umlauts, ö and ü, are rounded.
The unrounded back vowels are a, and ı; the rounded are o, and u.
Try moving between the rounded vowels and unrounded vowels, front then back: ü→i, ö→e, then u→ı, and o→a.
The effect of rounded versus unrounded is not quite so straightforward as that between front and back, though there is one helpful rule, which is that a non-rounded final vowel forces non-roundness on the suffix vowels:
ev (house) becomes evim (my house), sıcak (hot) becomes sıcaklık (heat).
A rounded final vowel cannot force roundness on a or e, so a suffix like –de (locative: in, at or on) can only respond to frontness or backness in the preceding vowel:
evimde (in my house): here –de follows with a front vowel, but for ‘in a box’ kutu (box) the suffix becomes –da in kutuda, i.e. it changes to a back vowel in keeping with u, but not to a rounded back vowel.
Suffixes can be thought of as Type 2 or Type 4: Type 2 when their vowels (a or e) can only move between front or back; Type 4 when their vowels (ı, i, u and ü) can respond to roundness/non-roundness as well.
The plural suffix is a Type 2. It can be –ler or –lar as in evler and atlar above.
The genitive suffix is a Type 4. It can be -in or –ın (after unrounded front or back), or -ün or -un (after rounded front or back), as in evin (of a house), atın (of a horse), köyün (of a village, köy), odanın (of a room).
To summarize:
With Type 2 suffix vowels (a, e)
Front base vowels e i ö ü are followed by e
Back base vowels a ı o u are followed by a
With Type 4 suffix vowels (ı i u ü)
Front base vowels e i are followed by front vowel
i
Front base vowels ö ü are followed by ü
Back base vowels a ı are followed by back vowel ı
Back base vowels
o u are followed by back vowel u
Exceptions to Vowel Harmony These occur mainly in imported words, compounds comprising two words as opposed to agglutinative compounds, and some proper names.
Turkish words and phrases