Vowel Harmony

One of the most important features of the Mongolian language is that of vowel harmony. Vowel harmony is a type of assimilation which takes place when vowels come to share certain features with contrastive vowels elsewhere in a word or phrase. In the case of Mongolian, the first vowel of a word determines the quality of all subsequent vowels in that word. Therefore Mongolian words may only contain either front (e,ö,ü) or back (a,o,u) vowels. The vowel ‘i’ is considered neutral and can occur in back and front vowel words. Words in which all the vowels are ‘i’ are classed as front vowel words.