Vowel harmony: A Comparative Study of Turkey's and Azerbaijani Turkish

The main purpose of this paper is to compare and contrast the treatment of vowel harmony, a kind of long-distance assimilatory phonological process involving vowels, in Turkey's Turkish and Azerbaijani Turkish (Iran). Examining carefully the linguistic data obtained from the dialects and within the framework of generative phonology, the author of the paper has attempted to evaluate the present-day situation of vowel harmony (a synchronic study) in the above- mentioned members of Oghuz languages. The results of the study showed that, except some violations mostly observed in loanwords, there is an innate and high degree of harmony in both of them, along with some degrees of disharmony. It can be claimed that one of the main factors of the observed disharmony, among other factors, is the effect of other languages and the existence of loanwords. Generally speaking, we may conclude that vowel harmony is one of the most active and prominent phonological rules both in Turkey's Turkish and Azerbaijani Turkish (Iran), of course with some degrees of difference.