Phonological Structure and Vowel Harmony in Chukchee

Abstract

The purpsoe of this study is to address the phonological structure of Chukchee language and provide a phonological rule for vowel harmony in terms of vocalic high-low feature. Chukchee is a Chukotko-Kamchatkan language spoken by about 10,400 people in northeastern Siberia, mainly on the Chukchee peninsula or Chukotka between the Chukchee and Bering Seas, and also in bordering areas of the Sakha Republic, Magadan Oblast', and the Koryak Autonomous Region. Chukchee was originally written with the Latin alphabet, then in the 1930s a switch was made to the Cyrillic alphabet. Chukchee is famous for its dominant-recessive vowel harmony system. The vowel harmony is that if the word contains a morpheme with dominant vowels /e, a, o/ then the vowels /i, e, u/ of all recessive morphemes anywhere in the word change to their dominant counterparts. Confusingly, /e/ belongs to both sets. There is no clear consensus in the literature as to exactly how the vowels are pronounced, though /i, u/are lax rather than tense. By adopting the table of distinctive vocalic features, modifying the vocalic features by Kenstowicz (1994) and Spencer, I propose the phonological rule for the vowel harmony in Chukchee. The rule is formed by high-low feature which is one of the major vocalic feature on the basis of a phonemic level rather than a phonetic one.