Hungarian Vowel Harmony
Authors: Törkenczy Miklós 
Published: September 2016

Vowel harmony is the phonological requirement that vowels must agree in their specifications for some designated feature(s) (e.g., backness, roundness, height, tongue root) within a prosodically or morphologically defined domain (e.g., root, stem, syllable, phonological word). If the domain of harmony is larger than the root, it results in alternations (typically, harmonically alternating affixes). Hungarian displays two kinds of vowel harmony, a pervasive front/back (palatal) harmony and a more limited roundness (labial) harmony. The latter never occurs independently of the first type of harmony. Both kinds of harmony are stem-controlled and directionally left-to-right; that is, the relevant harmonic properties of the stem determine those of the harmonically alternating suffixes. There are suffixes that show two-way alternation (back ~ front) and suffixes that show three-way alternation (back ~ unrounded front ~ rounded front). The domain of harmony is the word, which does not include prefixes and certain suffixes. Consonants neither initiate nor block harmony. Front/back harmony can apply long-distance, skipping neutral vowels, which are thus transparent. There are four neutral vowels (/iː, i, eː, ɛ/) representing different degrees of neutrality, the gradience manifesting itself chiefly in the variability of transparency: /iː, i/ are fully transparent, there is some variation between transparency and opacity with /eː/, and there is massive variation with /ɛ/ (this is referred to as the “height effect” in the literature, cf. Hayes and Cziráky Londe 2006, cited under Gradience, Variation, Transparency, the Height Effect, and the Count Effect). More than one neutral vowel is also less transparent than a single one (this is referred to as the “count effect,” cf. Hayes and Cziráky Londe 2006, cited under Gradience, Variation, Transparency, the Height Effect, and the Count Effect). It is generally assumed that in a harmony system with neutral vowels, those vowels of the inventory are the neutral ones that cannot harmonically alternate, since they lack their harmonic counterparts. Hungarian is interesting or problematic in this respect because, of the four neutral vowels, /eː, ɛ/ are involved in harmonic alternations in suffixes. On the other hand, almost all of the suffixes that do not alternate harmonically have one of the neutral vowels (except /ɛ/). The neutral vowels (which are phonetically front) can also regularly combine with back vowels within the root. Hungarian has front/back anti-harmony: some neutral-vowel roots consistently take an anti-harmonic back suffix alternant rather than the front one, while others (the majority of similar roots) behave in the way required by front/back harmony (and take a front suffix). Roundness harmony has none of the intricacies of front/back harmony: it does not apply in roots, there are no long-distance transparency effects, and it shows no variation. It is also restricted in height: while the source of roundness harmony can be a rounded vowel of any height, the suffixal target vowel is never high. Roundness harmony interacts with another process (Lowering) that results in the suspension of roundness harmony after inflectional suffixes and some roots (and may result in four-way suffix alternations).