The Emergence of Vowel Harmony in Armenian Dialects: Turkic Influence, Endogeny, or Both?
Hopkins, Elizabeth and Vaux, Bert · 2025
Many non-standard varieties of modern Armenian have vowel harmony, and it has been assumed this was acquired through contact with Turkic. Surveying the synchrony and typology of Armenian vowel harmony, the historical changes that could have produced it, and new data on the origins of backness and rounding harmony in Oghuz, the authors find Turkish influence but reject a straightforward copying account: Armenian and Turkish harmony differ too much. They argue harmony arose from a mix of internal and external factors: vowel shifts in certain Armenian dialects plus universal biases created the preconditions by the eleventh century AD, before Turkic speakers arrived in the Armenian homeland.
Read the publication ↗Citation
Hopkins, Elizabeth and Vaux, Bert 2025. The Emergence of Vowel Harmony in Armenian Dialects: Turkic Influence, Endogeny, or Both?. Linguistic Variation, Vol. 25, No. 2, pp. 306–345 (John Benjamins); DOI 10.1075/lv.23049.hop. https://doi.org/10.1075/lv.23049.hop
What this offers a reader
Pushes back on the assumption that a signature feature of Armenian dialects was simply borrowed from Turkish.
Vaux is the leading non-Armenian specialist on Armenian phonology.
Not everything distinctive in our dialects came from the Turks. The dates do not work.
Did Armenian dialects borrow vowel harmony from Turkish? The dates do not support it.
Topics
Citation checked against the publisher's record on .