Zníi

Zníi is a fictional term used in linguistic pedagogy and world-building to describe a hypothetical phonological process. It is not attested in natural languages and is primarily employed as an instructional example to illustrate how vowel harmony and consonant environments can interact within a word.

In the zníi model, vowels within a morpheme harmonize to a target height and backness determined by a triggering vowel in the syllable nucleus. The change typically spreads from right to left across adjacent syllables and is blocked by certain consonant environments, producing distinct vowel sets that co-occur with specific consonant contexts.

Zníi is commonly used in teaching to demonstrate how hypothetical rules can generate predictable patterns, and in world-building to add realism to the languages of a fictional culture. Comparisons with real-world vowel harmony systems help students understand general phonological principles without claiming real-world validity.

Two common variants appear in practice: zníi-1, which uses a right-to-left spread with a narrow conditioning set, and zníi-2, which allows broader spread and a larger vowel inventory. Some writers treat zníi as a single flexible framework rather than two distinct rules.

The concept arose in introductory materials and has since circulated in textbooks, course notes, and conlang communities as a compact illustration of rule interaction in phonology.