Abstract:

Palatal harmony is a situation regarding that vowels show similarity in terms of place/point of articulation. It is expressed by such terms as ‘‘backness-frontness harmony’’, ‘‘palatal harmony’’ and ‘‘major vowel harmony’’ etc. in Turkey Turkish. Back vowels are articulated in back (non-anterior) section of oral/mouth cavity; front vowels in anterior (frontal) section of it. Palatal harmony is the rule that, if there is a back vowel in the first syllable of a word, vowels which appear in the following syllables should become back; if there be a front vowel, those ones following become front, as well. It is seen that, when examining examples which break palatal harmony, some of them are at the base/bottom of the word, some are at the affixes of it. Some affixes are units that becames an affix in process of time. A rule that is very important in vowel harmonies is that each vowel in a word is subject to predecessor vowel. If harmony in a word is broken, vowels of affixes, which will come after that point, should harmonize (obey to) nature of the predecessor vowel. Isparta city is composed of thirteen district dialects. In this study, we compared palatal harmony in dialects of Isparta city with standard (common/formal) language, and also evaluated word bases/bottoms and affixes according to (in comparison to) the standard language. Through these data evaluated, we presented situations where the palatal harmony is developed (advanced) or underdeveloped according to Turkey Turkish. While conducting this study, we reviewed the relevant literatures.

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