takavokaali

Takavokaali, or “back vowel,” is a term used in phonology to describe a vowel produced with the tongue body retracted toward the back of the mouth. This property is contrasted with etuvokaalit, or front vowels, which are articulated with the tongue more toward the front of the oral cavity. Backness is one dimension of vowel quality and often interacts with tongue height and rounding to create distinct vowel inventories in languages.

In many languages, the set of takavokaalit is language-specific. They may be unrounded or rounded, and they can vary in height from low to high. In languages with vowel harmony, backness is a central feature, and suffix vowels or affixes may harmonize to match the backness of the root or stem. This harmony helps regulate the phonological structure of words and can constrain permissible morpheme combinations.

In Finnish linguistics, takavokaalit typically refer to the back vowels of the language’s inventory, such as a, o, and u. These back vowels contrast with etuvokaalit (front vowels) like ä, ö, y, as well as the front unrounded vowels e and i. Finnish vowel harmony is less strict than in some other languages, but backness still influences suffix vowels in certain grammatical contexts.

Examples from other languages illustrate the concept: Turkish contrasts back vowels a, ɯ, o, u with front vowels e, i, ö, ü; Hungarian similarly aligns vowels across morphemes along a back–front dimension. Takavokaali thus denotes a fundamental articulatory category relevant to phonetics and phonology across languages.