Abstract
Little is known about patterns of vowel harmony change in language contact situations. Trabzon Turkish (TT), which is spoken in the North East of Turkey and has a language contact history with (Pontic) Greek, Armenian, and Laz, provides such a context. This study investigates vowel harmony in TT and compares it with Standard Turkish (ST). Based on a quantitative analysis derived from a corpus of written texts in TT, this study shows how TT exhibits partial vowel harmony. TT displays a reduced amount of vowel harmony compared to ST, which suggest that TT might have experienced decay. Additional findings of this study indicate that vowels are influenced by following adjacent consonants, some suffixes have fixed forms with non-alternating vowels, but linear harmony decay across the word is not observed.
Highlights
Vowel harmony (VH) is described as a phonological assimilation process which requires the vowels within a domain to agree in terms of their quality such as height, backness, rounding, or position of tongue root (Kaun 2004, Walker 2012, Rose & Walker 2011, Van der Hulst 2016)
The main interest of the current research is to fill this gap by investigating VH in Trabzon Turkish (TT), which is a dialect spoken in Trabzon in the North East of Turkey
The results confirm this, with respect to rounding harmony. 69% of TT suffix tokens have harmony, but 31% lack harmony compared to Standard Turkish (ST), where the suffixes are harmonic in all instances
Summary
Vowel harmony (VH) is described as a phonological assimilation process which requires the vowels within a domain to agree in terms of their quality such as height, backness, rounding, or position of tongue root (Kaun 2004, Walker 2012, Rose & Walker 2011, Van der Hulst 2016). TT has a rich language contact history mainly between Turkish and Pontic Greek (PG) speakers and with Laz and Armenian speakers. PG, Laz, and Armenian lack VH of any kind and they lack three of the Turkish phonemic vowels /W , y, œ/ (Godel 1975, Mackridge 1987, Dum-Tragut 2009, Ozturk & Pochtrager 2011). This raises the question of what happens when native speakers of a language which has a smaller vowel system compared to Turkish (e.g., PG, Armenian, Laz) acquire Turkish and whether these speakers produce VH or not. Based on a corpus of written texts of TT, the current research examines how VH is manifested in morphologically complex forms in TT
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