Turkish Vowel Harmony — Simple Examples
I was talking about Turkish vowel harmony with some Turkish friends recently and was surprised when they didn’t know what I was talking about.
To be clear, they’re Turkish Australian friends who grew up speaking Turkish at home without necessarily studying its grammar. They can use vowel harmony perfectly well. They just didn’t have a label for the thing they were doing. I find that fascinating.
In Turkish, the vowels in many endings change to match the word they attach to. You hear the pattern in plurals, possession and questions.
The patterns group vowels by tongue position and lip shape. You can hear them in short everyday sentences, even if your Turkish-speaking friends have never had to name the rule.
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The two kinds of Turkish vowel harmony
Turkish has eight written vowels: a, e, ı, i, o, ö, u, ü. The dotless ı and dotted i stand for different sounds.
There are two main patterns. Both normally follow the last vowel before an ending — not necessarily the final letter of the word.
| Kind of harmony | Ending vowels | Quick example |
|---|---|---|
| Two-way (A-type) | a or e | Evler. (Houses) / Arabalar. (Cars) |
| Four-way (I-type) | ı, i, u or ü | İyiyim. (I’m well) / Yorgunum. (I’m tired) |
The suffix keeps the same job as its vowel changes. My Turkish vowel harmony guide explains the grammar in more detail. Here, I’ll use short phrases so you can hear the pattern.
Two-way vowel harmony: -lar and -ler
Two-way vowel harmony chooses e after the front vowels e, i, ö, ü, and a after the back vowels a, ı, o, u. That’s the whole vowel rule.
| Last vowel before the suffix | Choose | Example |
|---|---|---|
| e, i, ö, ü | e | Evler — houses |
| a, ı, o, u | a | Arabalar — cars |
The plural ending is -ler or -lar. So ev (house) becomes evler, but araba (car) becomes arabalar. Try göz (eye) → gözler (eyes), and okul (school) → okullar (schools).
You also hear it in location endings: evde (at home) but okulda (at school). At times the consonant changes as well — parkta (at the park) — for a different reason. That’s covered in my Turkish consonant harmony guide.
Four-way vowel harmony: ı, i, u and ü
For four-way harmony, match the last vowel to one of four pairs. Each pair shares a tongue position and a lip shape.
| Last vowel before the ending | Ending vowel | Sound group |
|---|---|---|
| e or i | i | front, unrounded |
| a or ı | ı | back, unrounded |
| o or u | u | back, rounded |
| ö or ü | ü | front, rounded |
“Front” and “back” describe tongue position; “rounded” means you round your lips. Find the last vowel in the word, then use the matching row.
Four identical conversations: ‘Are you…?’ ‘I’m…’
These are my favourite examples. Each pair asks “Are you…?” and answers “I’m…”, so you can hear the suffix vowel change while the sentence structure stays familiar.
| Four-way pattern | Question | Answer |
|---|---|---|
| i (e, i) | İyi misin? Are you well? | İyiyim. I’m well. |
| ı (a, ı) | Hazır mısın? Are you ready? | Hazırım. I’m ready. |
| u (o, u) | Yorgun musun? Are you tired? | Yorgunum. I’m tired. |
| ü (ö, ü) | Üzgün müsün? Are you sad? | Üzgünüm. I’m sad. |
Look at yorgun. The last vowel is u, so both the question particle mu and the first-person ending in yorgunum use u. With üzgün, the last vowel is ü, so you get mü and -üm.
Write the question marker mi/mı/mu/mü separately, then attach the personal ending to it: iyi misin. Both vowels follow harmony. The Turkish Language Association explains the spelling rule.
Other everyday examples: ‘my…’ and objects
Now listen for the same four vowels doing two different jobs: possession (my hand, my nose) and the ending that marks a particular direct object (the house, the milk).
| Pattern | ‘My…’ (-im/-ım/-um/-üm) | Object (-i/-ı/-u/-ü) |
|---|---|---|
| i | Elim ağrıyor. My hand hurts. | Evi temizle. Clean the house. |
| ı | Başım ağrıyor. My head hurts. | Kapıyı aç. Open the door. |
| u | Burnum tıkalı. My nose is blocked. | Telefonu ver. Give me the phone. |
| ü | Gözüm ağrıyor. My eye hurts. | Sütü iç. Drink the milk. |
Turkish inserts a linking y between the final vowel of kapı (door) and the object ending -ı, giving kapıyı. The ending still follows vowel harmony.
The last vowel in telefon is o, so the object ending uses u: telefonu.
Polite requests: mi, mı, mu and mü
You can also use four-way harmony to ask friends to do things. These requests have the same question marker from the examples above.
| Pattern | Turkish | English |
|---|---|---|
| i | Gelir misin? | Can you come? |
| ı | Bakar mısın? | Can you take a look? |
| u | Oturur musun? | Would you sit down? |
| ü | Bunu düşünür müsün? | Would you think about this? |
These use the informal singular ‘you’. For a polite request to a stranger, or when speaking to several people, use the corresponding -siniz/-sınız/-sunuz/-sünüz ending. For instance, Bakar mısınız? means ‘Could you take a look?’
Does vowel harmony work in every Turkish word?
In everyday Turkish, these rules are very dependable, but they have exceptions. Loanwords can have mixed vowel groups. Telefon is a familiar example, and it still takes -u in telefonu according to its last vowel. Some borrowed words and some fixed-vowel endings behave differently.
Words can also take several endings, with the two-way and four-way rules taking turns. In okul-lar-ımız-da (‘at our schools’), the plural ending gets a, ‘our’ gets ı, and the location ending gets a. Each ending has its own vowel pattern.
Vowel harmony is also different from consonant changes such as kitapta (in the book), where the location ending starts with t rather than d. And if you’re wondering why Turkish has all these endings in the first place, my overview of Turkish grammar explains how they fit together.
Which other languages have vowel harmony?
It’s far from unique to Turkish. Other Turkic languages, such as Kazakh, Kyrgyz and Azerbaijani, have related harmony patterns. In the Uralic family, Finnish and Hungarian have well-studied front/back vowel harmony. Mongolian has a different arrangement, and many West African languages and varieties — including Yoruba dialects — have harmony systems that often depend on tongue-root position.
You can see how these systems differ in John Goldsmith’s comparison of Mongolian, Yaka, Finnish and Hungarian and research on three Yoruba dialects. Their shared sound patterns don’t prove that all these languages have a common ancestor. Even the traditional ‘Altaic’ grouping is disputed: Juha Janhunen’s 2023 review discusses the separate language families and centuries of contact.
Where did vowel harmony come from, and how old is it?
One explanation for vowel harmony starts with coarticulation: when you pronounce a vowel, it slightly influences nearby vowels. Over generations, that tendency can become a regular rule which children learn as part of their language.
Researchers study how that can happen, although they still debate the precise steps. For a linguistic explanation, see Amanda Rysling’s work on the phonetic origins of vowel harmony and Frédéric Mailhot’s model of harmony emerging through language learning.
In the Turkic languages, harmony is old. Written Old Turkic inscriptions from the eighth century CE already provide evidence of front/back vowel patterns. Scholars still debate details of the early vowel system, including how closely it resembled modern Turkish. A study of the Orkhon inscriptions explores some of those questions. The inscriptions establish written evidence of harmony by that date.
An easy way to practise
Say the four ‘Are you…?’ pairs out loud, with the answer straight after each question. Then go from elim (my hand) to başım (my head), burnum (my nose) and gözüm (my eye). It’s the same grammatical idea each time.
If your goal is conversation rather than a grammar exam, start there. Then take a few sentences from the everyday Turkish phrases guide and see whether you can predict which suffix vowel they’ll use.
