Magánhangzóharmóniája

Magánhangzóharmóniája, or vowel harmony, is a phonological process found in many agglutinative languages, including Hungarian, Finnish, and Turkish. It dictates that vowels within a word must belong to the same class. This means that all vowels in a word will either be front vowels or back vowels, and often also fall into specific rounding categories (e.g., all rounded or all unrounded).

Hungarian exhibits a prominent form of vowel harmony, dividing its vowels into two main groups: front vowels (e, é, i, í, ö, ő, ü, ű) and back vowels (a, á, o, ó, u, ú). Additionally, a third category, neutral vowels (e, é, i, í), can sometimes appear with either front or back vowels depending on the specific word and grammatical context, though they are primarily considered front vowels.

The primary function of vowel harmony is to maintain phonetic consistency within a word. This is particularly relevant in agglutinative languages where suffixes are added to a root word to modify its meaning. The vowel in the suffix will typically assimilate to the dominant vowel class of the root. For example, in Hungarian, the accusative suffix has two forms: -t for words with back vowels and -t for words with front vowels. A word like "ház" (house), with back vowels, takes the suffix -t to become "házat". A word like "kert" (garden), with front vowels, takes the suffix -t to become "kertet". This systematic assimilation contributes to the characteristic sound and structure of these languages.