VOWEL HARMONY AND ITS DISCONTENTS: RETHINKING URALIC SOUND SYMBOLISM

Vowel harmony has long served as one of the defining typological features of the Uralic languages, treated primarily as a matter of phonological patterning: the co-occurrence restrictions that require suffix vowels to agree in backness, and sometimes rounding, with the vowels of a word's root. This article argues that the near-exclusive framing of Uralic vowel harmony as a structural or morphophonological phenomenon has obscured a second, underexamined dimension of the same system: its role in sound-symbolic meaning-making. Drawing on comparative evidence from Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, and smaller Finno-Ugric languages such as Mari and Udmurt, the article traces a persistent, cross-linguistic association between front-vowel harmony classes and concepts of smallness, closeness, and diminution, and between back-vowel classes and largeness, distance, and augmentation. This association recurs in expressive vocabulary, diminutive morphology, and child-directed speech across genetically related but geographically dispersed Uralic languages, in patterns too consistent to be dismissed as coincidental borrowing or independent onomatopoeic invention. The article reviews the iconicity and sound-symbolism literature developed largely outside Uralic studies, and asks why this literature has had so little uptake among Uralicists, who have generally treated harmony as an arbitrary phonological rule rather than as a system with residual semantic motivation. Rather than claiming that vowel harmony originated as a symbolic system, the article proposes a more modest and defensible thesis: that an originally phonological harmony system has, in certain lexical domains, been recruited and reinforced by iconic association, producing a synchronic layer of sound symbolism that coexists with, rather than replaces, the system's morphophonological function. The discussion considers the methodological obstacles to testing this claim and outlines a comparative research agenda for Uralic linguistics going forward.