Turkish Vowel Harmony Checker

Test Turkish words for vowel harmony

Vowel harmony (ünlü uyumu) is a core feature of Turkish: in native words, all vowels agree in backness. This checker analyzes the vowels in a word or suffix chain and flags any that break the front-or-back series, which is handy for verifying generated suffixes, learning Turkish morphology, or spotting loanwords.

The two vowel groups

Turkish divides its eight vowels into two sets based on where in the mouth they are formed:

In a native Turkish word the first vowel picks the group and every following vowel must stay in the same group. Suffixes follow the same rule — the suffix vowel changes to match the root. For example, the plural suffix is -ler after front roots (evler — houses) and -lar after back roots (araba**lar** — cars).

How it works

The tool extracts every vowel from the word and classifies it as front or back. It takes the first vowel as the baseline backness for the word, then checks every subsequent vowel against it. Any vowel in the opposite group is reported as a violation, with its position and the group it was expected to match. Words with zero or one vowel are reported as trivially harmonious.

Examples

evlerimizde  -> harmonious  (all front: e, e, i, i, e)
arabadan     -> harmonious  (all back:  a, a, a)
kitap        -> violation   (loanword from Arabic — i/front then a/back)
otobüs       -> violation   (loanword from French — o/back then ü/front)

kitap and otobüs are perfectly valid Turkish words; the flag shows they are loanwords that predate or bypass the harmony rule, not spelling errors.

When is this useful?

• Language learners building suffix chains can paste the derived form to confirm each added suffix stayed in harmony.
• NLP and computational linguistics: test tokenized forms and generated paradigms before running further analysis.
• Educators: demonstrating to students exactly which vowel breaks the rule and why.
• Translators and copywriters: checking that an invented brand name or product term is internally harmonious, so it sounds native.

Suffix chaining: practical example for learners

When constructing Turkish words by adding suffixes, each suffix must pick its vowel to match the root’s backness. For example, the possessive suffix “-im” takes the form that fits the last vowel of the root:

• ev (house) → evim (my house) — both front
• araba (car) → arabam (my car) — the suffix vowel shifts to a (back) to match

If you build a derived word and paste it here, the checker will confirm whether every suffix vowel stayed in the correct group. A violation at a suffix boundary (rather than within the root) signals that a suffix vowel was applied in the wrong harmony class.

Tips and notes

• This checks backness harmony only — the most fundamental rule. Rounding harmony (küçük ünlü uyumu), which governs whether suffix vowels are rounded, is a separate and additional constraint not evaluated here.
• A flagged loanword is not an error: borrowings like kitap, otobüs, and program legitimately break native harmony and are simply identified as non-native.
• The analysis runs entirely in your browser, so input stays private.