What is backness vowel harmony?

Backness (büyük ünlü uyumu) means all vowels in a native Turkish word share the same backness. Front vowels (e, i, ö, ü) group together, and back vowels (a, ı, o, u) group together. The checker compares each vowel against the first.

How does the tool decide if a word is harmonious?

It takes the backness of the first vowel as the baseline. Every following vowel must match that group. If any vowel differs, the word is flagged with the position and the group it should have matched.

Why do words like kitap fail the check?

Loanwords often break harmony. kitap mixes the back vowel i-like a with i, and otobüs mixes back and front vowels. These are legitimate Turkish words borrowed from other languages, so a flag here is expected, not an error.

Does it check rounding (small) vowel harmony too?

No. This tool checks backness harmony only, the most fundamental rule. Rounding harmony (küçük ünlü uyumu), which governs suffix vowel rounding, is a separate constraint not evaluated here.

What about single-vowel or vowel-less words?

A word with one vowel is trivially harmonious, and a word with no vowels has nothing to check. The tool notes both cases instead of flagging them.

Turkish Vowel Harmony Checker

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Test Turkish words for vowel harmony

Vowel harmony (ünlü uyumu) is a core feature of Turkish: in native words, all vowels agree in backness. This checker analyzes the vowels in a word or suffix chain and flags any that break the front-or-back series, which is handy for verifying generated suffixes or spotting loanwords.

How it works

The tool extracts every vowel from the word and classifies it:

front vowels: e, i, ö, ü
back vowels: a, ı, o, u

It takes the first vowel as the baseline backness for the word, then checks every subsequent vowel against it. Any vowel in the opposite group is reported as a violation, with its position and the group it was expected to match. Words with zero or one vowel are reported as trivially harmonious.

Example

evlerimizde  -> harmonious (all front: e, e, i, i, e)
kitap        -> violation  (loanword, mixes groups)
otobüs       -> violation  (loanword, o/o back then ü front)

Tips and notes

This checks backness harmony only — the most fundamental rule. Rounding harmony, which governs whether suffix vowels are rounded, is a separate constraint not evaluated here.
A flagged loanword is not an error: borrowings like kitap and otobüs legitimately break native harmony.
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