VOWEL HARMONY

1. (Phonology) Traditionally considered an assimilatory process that changes the underlying form of a word into a surface form with a restricted set of vowel feature combinations. Assimilation describes a type of input-output mapping in which an input form contains one segment that is associated to a feature and that feature is then shared with, copied, or spread onto other segments. Vowel harmony includes a variety of patterns in which vowels assimilate in a specific feature; for example, a language might have patterns in which vowels assimilate to a round, advanced tongue root (ATR), or height feature. Natural languages can also combine more than one vowel harmony pattern. In transformational analyses the vowels that undergo assimilation are called targets, and the one that they assimilate to is called the trigger. In the case of vowel harmony the trigger and target segments are only vowels, and assimilation ignores all consonants. So the output surface autosegmental representation of a word that has undergone vowel harmony assimilation contains more than one vowel with the same feature as the trigger. I use word here to mean the phonological word, and throughout the dissertation a word consists of the phonological domain of vowel harmony. | Eileen Blum, 2023
2. (Phonology) Defined by Nevins (2010) as "a set of restrictions that determine the possible and impossible sequences of vowels within a word," requires every vowel occurring in one phonological word to share the same feature value in terms of language-specific harmonic constraints. | Yuki Asahi, 2012
3. (Example)
    ○ Consider the word formed by adding the following thirteen suffixes to the root Avrupa 'Europe':
   Turkish
   1. Avrupa-
      Europe-

      lı-
      from-

      laş-
      become-

      tır-
      CAUS-

      a-
      ABIL-

      ma-
      NEG-

      yacak-
      FUT-

      lar-
      PL-

      ımız-
      1PL-

      dan-
      ABL-

      mı-
      Q-

      y-
      COP-

      dı-
      PAST-

      nız
      2PL

      'Were you one of those whom we are not going to be able to turn into Europeans?'
   
    Avrupa has vowels in which the tongue is pulled back, and owing to harmonization, all thirteen suffixes have the tongue body pulled back as well. By contrast, if the last vowel in the root is a front vowel, like the /i/ in Akdeniz 'Mediterranean', all thirteen suffixes have front vowels.
   Akdeniz-
   Mediterranean
   li-
   from-
   leş-
   become-
   tir-
   CAUS-
   e-
   ABIL-
   me-
   NEG-
   yecek-
   FUT-
   ler-
   PL-
   imiz-
   1PL-
   den-
   ABL-
   mi-
   Q-
   y-
   COP-
   di-
   PAST-
   niz
   2PL
   'Were you one of those whom we are not going to be able to turn into Mediterraneans?'
   
    | Andrew Nevins, 2010

VOWEL HIATUS

1. (Phonology) The term vowel hiatus is commonly used to refer to a sequence of adjacent vowels belonging to separate syllables. | Roderic F. Casali, 2011
2. (Phonology) Many languages do not tolerate vowel hiatus. Where hiatus would arise in such languages through morphological or syntactic concatenation, it is typically eliminated. One very common means of resolving hiatus is to elide one of the adjacent vowels. In Etsako, for example, a word-final vowel is often elided before a following word-initial vowel, as in (1) (data from Elimelech 1976).
   Etsako (Niger-Congo; Nigeria)
   1. a.
       
      b.
       
      c.
       
      d.
       

      /dɛ
      buy
      /ukpo
      cloth
      /owa
      house
      /umhele
      salt

      akpa/
      cup
      ɛnodɛ/
      yesterday
      ɔda/
      different
      ɔtsomhi/
      some

      →
       
      →
       
      →
       
      →
       

      [dakpa]
       
      [ukpɛnodɛ]
       
      [owɔda]
       
      [umhelɔtsomhi]
       

      'buy a cup'
       
      'yesterday's cloth'
       
      'a different house'
       
      'some salt'
       
   
    Although elision of the first of two adjacent vowels is more common cross-linguistically, elision of the second vowel is also attested. | Roderic F. Casali, 1997
3. (Phonology) Or, diaeresis (/daɪˈɛrəsəs, -ˈɪər-/) or dieresis. Describes the occurrence of two separate vowel sounds in adjacent syllables with no intervening consonant. When two vowel sounds instead occur together as part of a single syllable, the result is called a diphthong.
    Some languages do not have diphthongs, except sometimes in rapid speech, or they have a limited number of diphthongs but also numerous vowel sequences that cannot form diphthongs and so appear in hiatus. That is the case for Nuosu (Sino-Tibetan; China), Bantu (Niger-Congo) languages like Swahili (macrolanguage; East Africa), and Lakota (Siouan-Catawban; USA, Canada). An example is Swahili eua 'purify' with three syllables.
    Many languages disallow or restrict hiatus and avoid it by deleting or assimilating the vowel sound or by adding an extra consonant sound. | Wikipedia, 2025
4. (Examples)
    ○ In Axininca Campa (Maipurean; Peru) hiatus is tolerated with -DIM (no epenthesis!) (Payne 1981)
   1. /hito-iriki/ → hito-iriki 'little spiders' * hito-tiriki
   2. /mapi-iriki/ → mapi-iriki 'little rock' * mapi-tiriki
   3. /ana-iriki/ → ana-iriki 'little black dye plant' * ana-tiriki
   
    | Kate Mooney, 2025
    ○ When two identical vowels meet in hiatus, one is deleted (Leslau 1995). Word-final -ä is generally truncated on allä, especially when encliticized (Leslau 1995).
   Amharic (Afro-Asiatic; Ethiopia)
   1. a. Underlying Form: sabrä-^w-allä-ä
      b. Vowel Hiatus Resolution: sabrä-^w-allä
      c. Truncation: sabrä-^w-all
   
    | Matt Hewett and Ruth Kramer, 2024
    ○ I also observe that no language has consonant copy epenthesis that targets a non-adjacent consonant (following Kawahara 2007). For instance, there is no language that routinely avoids vowel hiatus by reduplicating the preceding consonant.
   1. Hypothetical example of the unattested pattern:
      /pata-i/
      /pata-i-a/

      →
      →

      [pata-ti]
      [pata-ti-ta]

        
        

      /okor-i/
      /okor-i-a/

      →
      →

      [okor-i]
      [okor-i-ra]
   
    | Kate Mooney, 2023

VOWEL INHERENT SPECTRAL CHANGE

1. (Phonetics) It has been traditional in phonetic research to characterize monophthongs using a set of static formant frequencies, i.e., formant frequencies taken from a single time-point in the vowel or averaged over the time-course of the vowel. However, over the last twenty years a growing body of research has demonstrated that, at least for a number of dialects of North American English, vowels which are traditionally described as monophthongs often have substantial spectral change. Vowel inherent spectral change has been observed in speakers' productions and has also been found to have a substantial effect on listeners perception. In terms of acoustics, the traditional categorical distinction between monophthongs and diphthongs can be replaced by a gradient description of dynamic spectral patterns. | Geoffrey Stewart Morrison and Peter F. Assmann, 2015
2. (Phonetics) Nearey and Assmann (1986) coined the term vowel inherent spectral change to refer to change in spectral properties inherent to the phonetic specification of vowels. Although such change includes the relatively large formant changes associated with acknowledged diphthongs, the term was explicitly intended to include reliable (but possibly more subtle) spectral change associated with vowel categories of North American English typically regarded as monophthongs. | Terrance M. Nearey, 2012
3. (Example)
    ○ While it has long been established that diphthongs are characterized by changing formant frequencies over time, there is a growing volume of research that shows traditional monophthongs in English may be diphthongized in the sense that they too show vowel inherent spectral changes (VISC; Nearey and Assmann 1986, Hillenbrand et al. 1995). This VISC has been shown to be essential in vowel identification and discrimination.
    Three hypotheses of how VISC is detected by listeners have been proposed (Nearey and Assmann 1986, Gottfried et al. 1993, Morrison and Nearey 2007). All three are in agreement that the initial formant frequency is important in identifying vowels, but they differ in what other information is necessary.
   1. The onset-offset hypothesis suggests that formant frequencies at the beginning and the end of the vowel are the important spectral properties in perception.
   2. The slope hypothesis claims that perceptual cues are based on the rate of change over time for the formant frequencies irrespective of offset frequencies.
   3. Similar to the slope hypothesis, the direction hypothesis suggests that the direction of formant movement is the relevant piece of information irrespective of vowel duration.
   
    | Kathleen Chiddenton and Michael Kiefte, 2013

VOWEL INVENTORY

1. (Phonology) There are patterns that exist from language to language in how vowel inventories are organized. This is of interest to linguists as well as to conlangers, who often want to create a naturalistic vowel system.
    There are a lot of potential vowel qualities, but no language distinguishes between all of them. Instead, languages pick a subset of vowel qualities which they use as phonemes. And, in fact, the number of contrastive vowel qualities a language has is often quite low.
    The most common size for a vowel inventory is 5. Spanish is a good example of a 5-vowel system, with the vowels / a e i o u /. When inventories are small, as the Spanish inventory is, it is very common for all the front and central vowels to be unrounded and for all the back vowels to be rounded.
    Kalaallisut / Greenlandic (Eskimo-Aleut; Greenland) is a good example of a 3-vowel system, contrasting the vowels / i a u /. On the high end, it's uncommon for a language to distinguish more than 9 vowel qualities. A good example of a 9-vowel system is Lika (Atlantic-Congo, Bantu; D.R. Congo), which contrasts the vowels / i ɪ e ɛ ə a ɔ o ʊ u /. There are languages which go above 9—in fact, the variety of English I speak distinguishes 14 vowels and diphthongs.

   Canadian English

   	Front (Unrounded)	Central (Unrounded)	Back (Unrounded)	Back (Rounded)
   High	i			u
   	ɪ			ʊ
   Mid	(eɪ)	ə		(oʊ)
   	ɛ		ʌ	(ɔɪ)
   Low	æ	(aɪ) (aʊ)		ɑ

    The most basic vowels that almost every language has are / i a u /, i.e. the inventory of Kalaallisut. In a chart they're roughly evenly spaced. That's no accident. Vowel inventories seem to space themselves out as much as possible, as if to maximize contrast. If a language contrasts more than 5 vowels, that language is 100% certain to have / i a u /.
    As the number of vowels in an inventory increases, vowel systems start to include non-peripheral vowels, vowels which occupy the center of the space. The non-peripheral vowels include, most commonly, schwa /ə/ and barred I /ɨ/. | Colin Gorrie, 2021
2. (Examples)
    ○ Some researchers have suggested that L2 vowel acquisition, apart from perceptual similarity, is affected by the learners' L1 vowel inventory size, so that speakers of languages with large vowel inventories have a benefit over speakers of languages with smaller vowel inventories (Fox, Flege, and Munro 1995, Frieda and Nozawa 2007, Hacquard, Walter, and Marantz 2007, Iverson and Evans 2007). | Hanna Kivistö-de Souza, Angélica Carlet, Izabela Julkowska, and Anabela Rato, 2017
    ○ There are strong areal patterns in the distribution of vowel quality inventories. Not surprisingly, languages with average inventory sizes are the most widely scattered. In just a few areas, southern Africa being one, they occur almost to the exclusion of the other two types. Small and large inventories on the other hand are markedly skewed in their geographical distributions. Languages with small inventories are frequent in the Americas. The indigenous languages of the Americas quite often have four vowels in a set similar to that of Spanish except for missing an /u/-like vowel. Examples of languages having this kind of system are Eastern Ojibwa (Algonquian; Ontario), Navajo (Athapaskan; southwestern USA), North Puebla Nahuatl (Uto-Aztecan; Mexico), and Tacana (Tacanan; Bolivia). Others of these languages, such as Aymara (macrolanguage; Bolivia), Cherokee (Iriquoian; USA), and Haida (macrolanguage; Canada), have three-vowel systems, usually reported as having two high vowels /i, u/ and a low central vowel /a/. In Australia small vowel inventories dominate, this feature being just one of a number of properties which tend to give the languages native to this part of the world a special character from the point of view of their sound patterns. Small vowel inventories occur rarely in the remaining parts of the world, that is, in Africa, the entire Eurasian mainland and New Guinea and the Pacific Islands, although there are some specific small language groups, such as the Berber languages of North Africa and the Northwest Caucasian languages spoken near the border of Russia and Georgia, which may have this feature. | Ian Maddieson, 2013
    ○ If vowel inventory does not affect coarticulation, what can account for language differences in vowel-to-vowel coarticulation? | Peggy P.K. Mok, 2012
    ○ Universal tendencies in languages are often cited as evidence that at least some of language's structure is innate, rather than learned. One such pattern is the overwhelming tendency for vowel inventories to be organized into acoustically well-dispersed and symmetrical forms. For example, there are many more three-vowel languages with a triangular [i a u] inventory than the more lopsided [i a o], or worse [ə e a]. | Joanisse and Mark S. Seidenberg, 1997

VOWEL MATCHING
(Examples)
 ○ Vowel Alternations in Seediq (Austronesian; Taiwan) Verb Paradigms

1.	Stem	Suffixed	UR	Gloss
a.	ˈpemux	puˈmexan	/pemex/	'hold'
b.	ˈkoduŋ	kuˈdoŋ-an	/kodoŋ/	'hook'

fucktrumpet, cuntmuffin, cockwaffle, shitgibbon, piss-biscuit

VOWEL PLACEMENT
(Examples)
 ○ The first distinction that can be made when discussing vowel placement in the oral cavity is a high/low dimension, corresponding to the height of the body of the tongue during the articulation of a vowel (Sundberg 1969). Using this height distinction, vowels can be plotted within the vowel space as high, mid or low, as seen in (1) below. The second distinction is a front/back dimension which refers to the extent to which the body of the tongue lies towards the front, middle or back of the vowel space (Sundberg 1969). Using this backness distinction, vowels can be plotted within the vowel space as front, mid or back, as seen in (1).

1. English Vowel Chart

	Front	Central	Back
High	/i/, /ɪ/		/u/, /ʊ/
Mid	/e/, /ɛ/	/ə/, /ʌ/	/o/
Low	/æ/		/ɑ/

Temiar Syllabification (Itô 1989)
1. a. /slɔg/ səlɔg 'sleep, marry (ACT PERF)'
   b. /snlɔg/ senlɔg 'sleep, marry (ACT PERF NOMINALIZED)'
   c. /snglɔg/ səneglɔg 'sleep, marry (ACT CONT NOMINALIZED)'

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