Vowel Harmony Some languages in Asia, Europe and Africa employ vowel harmony. It means that a word may contain only the approved vowels of a certain set. The criterion may be front or back position, nasal or palatal articulation, lip rounding or the position of the tongue root. Vowel harmony is a process of assimilation in which the sounds of a word are shaped aesthetically. The result is called metaphony and it serves Eurasiatic, Niger-Congo and the NiloSaharan languages very well. In Eurasiatic languages it usually means that a word has either front or back vowels and that the vowels of the suffixes or declensions get in line with the “Anlaut” of the root. Some languages employ lip rounding harmony too, which occurs together with front-back harmony. African and Mongolian languages tend to use tongue root position (ATR) harmony. The Niger-Congo languages that have two sets of vowels: /i e ə o u/ and /i ε a ɔ υ/ use only one set in a word. Even in languages without vowel harmony, restrictions are often placed on a word’s second vowel. Nilo-Saharan might have borrowed tongue root position harmony from the Niger-Congo family but it might also be an ancient inherent trait of Proto-Nilo-Saharan. Vowel harmony is strongest in the Uralo-Siberian (Finnish, Hungarian) and Transeurasian (Turkic, Mongolic) branches of Eurasiatic, and in the Niger-Congo family. It does not seem to be important to the Afroasiatic family although there are Arabic dialects with vowel harmony, and historically the phenomenon of Babylonian vowel harmony is well known. That was after the Akkadian language gained a fourth vowel, /e/ (on top of /a/, /u/ and /i/) by virtue of Sumerian which in many ways was the polar opposite of Akkadian.
8
