Volga Tatar is a Turkic language spoken by 5 million people in Central Russia for which instrumental acoustic descriptions are lacking. This study uses formant analysis of acoustic recordings from 27 native speakers of Volga Tatar to describe the vowels of Tatar and evaluate the accuracy of previous impressionistic phonetic descriptions. In addition to describing the acoustic vowel space of Tatar, the study uses carefully chosen target words to evaluate vowel-to-vowel coarticulation in height and backness among the Tatar vowels /i, ae, ɑ/. Examining vowel-to-vowel coarticulation in Tatar is of particular theoretical interest due to the presence of vowel harmony in the language. While the majority of native Tatar words are subject to backness, and possibly rounding, harmony, a large class of disharmonic lexical items, mostly from borrowings, provides insight into the coexistence of long-distance phonological vowel assimilation (vowel harmony) and long-distance phonetic vowel assimilation (coarticulation) in the same language. Previous research (Banerjee, Dutta, & S., 2017; Beddor & Yavuz, 1995) suggests that vowel harmony may suppress coarticulation proceeding in the same direction. However, the current results indicate that direction of coarticulation in Tatar is mediated primarily by other factors, such as target and trigger vowel identity.Volga Tatar is a Turkic language spoken by 5 million people in Central Russia for which instrumental acoustic descriptions are lacking. This study uses formant analysis of acoustic recordings from 27 native speakers of Volga Tatar to describe the vowels of Tatar and evaluate the accuracy of previous impressionistic phonetic descriptions. In addition to describing the acoustic vowel space of Tatar, the study uses carefully chosen target words to evaluate vowel-to-vowel coarticulation in height and backness among the Tatar vowels /i, ae, ɑ/. Examining vowel-to-vowel coarticulation in Tatar is of particular theoretical interest due to the presence of vowel harmony in the language. While the majority of native Tatar words are subject to backness, and possibly rounding, harmony, a large class of disharmonic lexical items, mostly from borrowings, provides insight into the coexistence of long-distance phonological vowel assimilation (vowel harmony) and long-distance phonetic vowel assimilation (coarticulation) in...