What languages have vowel harmony?

What languages have vowel harmony?

Languages with vowel harmony

• Korean.
• Mongolian.
• Turkic languages.
• Uralic languages.

Do African languages have vowels?

The vast majority of African languages are tonal, and many also have vowel harmony (especially the types known as ATR- and vowel-height harmony).

How many types of vowel harmony are there?

If you’re adding multiple suffixes, remember that each new suffix must harmonize with the suffix immediately before it. There are two primary types of vowel harmony. We’ll call them i-type and e-type vowel harmony, and each has its own set of rules.

What is vowel harmony example?

Vowel harmony is a type of assimilation which takes place when vowels come to share certain features with contrastive vowels elsewhere in a word or phrase (Crystal 1992 168 ). Examples: A front vowel in the first syllable of a word would require the presence of a front vowel in the second syllable.

What is Yoruba vowel harmony?

The General Harmony Pattern. Standard Yoruba has seven oral vowels: [i, e, e, a, o, o, u].

What is vowel harmony in Igbo?

In Igbo, vowel harmony is the set of vowel pattern combinations that are usually found in one Igbo word. So for example, there are two different vowel harmony groups in Igbo: an A group and an E group. The A group consists of the vowel a, and all of the dotted Igbo vowels: ị , ọ, and ụ.

What is common about Bantu languages?

A common characteristic of Bantu languages is that they use words such as muntu or mutu for “human being” or in simplistic terms “person”, and the plural prefix for human nouns starting with mu- (class 1) in most languages is ba- (class 2), thus giving bantu for “people”.

What are African Bantu languages?

Bantu languages such as Swahili, Zulu, Chichewa or Bemba are spoken by an estimated 240 million speakers in 27 African countries, and are one of the most important language groups in Africa in terms of geographical and demographic distribution.

What is vowel in Yoruba?

The vowels in the Yorùbá alphabet are a, e, ẹ, i, o, ọ, u. You will notice that distinct from the other vowels, ẹ and ọ both have dots underneath them.

How many vowels are in Yoruba?

seven oral
Standard Yoruba has seven oral vowels: [i, e, e, a, o, o, u].

Does Tagalog have vowel harmony?

Tagalog has allophones, so it is important here to distinguish phonemes (written in slashes / /) and corresponding allophones (written in brackets [ ])….Table of vowel phonemes of Tagalog.

What are 3 major Bantu languages?

Is Bantu a Swahili?

Swahili is characteristically Bantu in its grammar, and it has a large vocabulary of word roots traceable to a common Bantu stock.

Is Yoruba a phonetic language?

Yoruba (/ˈjɒrʊbə/; Yor. Èdè Yorùbá; Ajami: عِدعِ يوْرُبا) is a language spoken in West Africa, primarily in Southwestern Nigeria. It is spoken by the ethnic Yoruba people….Yoruba language.

Is Igbo similar to Yoruba?

In language, they are both of the Kwa-group Niger-Congo origin. The similarities between the Yoruba and the Igbo language are remarkable, if not uncanny, which point to an identical fount. Despite having so much in common, politics has been a pesky point of dissonance for both groups.

Is Zulu a Bantu language?

Zulu language, a Bantu language spoken by more than nine million people mainly in South Africa, especially in the Zululand area of KwaZulu/Natal province. The Zulu language is a member of the Southeastern, or Nguni, subgroup of the Bantu group of the Benue-Congo branch of the Niger-Congo language family.

What 2 languages make up Swahili?

Swahili is predominantly a mix of local Bantu languages and Arabic. Decades of intensive trade along the East African coast resulted in this mix of cultures.

What is the oldest African language?

Ancient Egyptian: The reason why this is thought to be the oldest vernacular of Africa is that its complete written sentence, which was discovered, dates back to 2690 BC. A form of this tongue is still used by a limited number of people.

Can Yoruba speakers understand Igbo?

But Yoruba and Igbo, which were originally dialectal versions of the same language, are now different languages because they are no longer mutually intelligible.