The rise and fall of rounding harmony in Turkic

It has been proposed that vowel harmony in general arises through the phonologization of vowel-to-vowel coarticulation (e.g. Hyman 2002; Przezdziecki 2005; Barnes 2006). Specifically for Turkish, Johanson (1979a) argues that the evolution of rounding harmony is attributable to the reduced phonetic quality, [ə], of [+high] suffixes. Given these claims, the null hypothesis for the loss of phonological harmony would affect the domain of harmony as a whole, resulting in phonetic vowel-to-vowel coarticulation. Drawing on nineteenth-century texts and the authors’ own fieldwork on Crimean Tatar and Kazakh, this chapter argues that the decay of rounding harmony in numerous Turkic languages crucially involves contraction of the harmonic domain and the proliferation of invariant suffixes.