Visualizing Vowel Harmony

Abstract

This paper deals with vowel harmony from a cross-linguistic perspective, with the aim of visualizing the distribution of vowels in corpora so that languages with vowel harmony can be distinguished from those lacking it. For this purpose vowel successions within words are statistically analyzed and visualized in a quadratic matrix whose rows and columns are ordered according to their distribution in the text, with more similar vowels occurring closer together. The method has been tested on the basis of Bible corpora in a variety of languages including well-known harmonic languages such as Turkish, Hungarian and Finnish as well as non-harmonic languages.