Vowel harmony in Laz Turkish: a case study in language contact and language change

Abstract

Abstract Laz Turkish (LT) is a nonstandard variety of Turkish mainly spoken in the North East of Turkey. LT emerged due to language contact between Turkish (Turkic) and Laz (Kartvelian). Laz has a smaller vowel system compared to Turkish and this has impacted the vowel harmony (VH) system in LT. In contrast to ST, which has a productive VH system, LT has only partially productive VH. Based on a corpus of fieldwork data collected in Rize, Turkey, this study investigates how LT displays partial harmony. The results show that (i) /ɯ, y, œ/ are rare in LT, and ST /ɯ, y, œ/ correspond to /i, u, o/ in LT respectively, (ii) open syllables in LT tend to have /i/ compared to closed syllables which tend to occur with /u/, and (iii) the smaller vowel system has led to disharmony with respect to preceding vowels, but /i u o/ still trigger harmony on following vowels, so VH does not peter out across the word.