Kazakh Vowel Harmony

Kazakh grammar for beginners · The same system as Turkish — with one simplification

Vowel harmony is the Turkic norm, and Kazakh has it in full: a word consists of either back vowels or front vowels, not a mixture. Any suffix you attach must follow the root, exactly as in Turkish.

Front and back are literal: they name where the tongue sits while the vowel is being made — pushed forward towards the teeth, or drawn back towards the throat. Say Turkish i and then ı and you can feel it slide backwards. That one movement is the whole distinction, and Kazakh sorts its nine vowels by it exactly as Turkish does.

Put another way: if the first syllable of a native word has a back vowel, so does the second, and likewise for front vowels. That is the same instinct you already apply in Turkish without thinking about it.

The two vowel sets

	Kazakh	Turkish equivalent
Front	ä, e, ı, ö, ü (ә, е, і, ө, ү)	e, i, ö, ü
Back	a, o, ū, y (а, о, ұ, ы)	a, o, u, ı

Nine vowels in all — five front, four back — and the correspondence with Turkish is one-to-one. If you can hear Turkish harmony, you can hear Kazakh harmony. Note that u (у) and i (и) are deliberately absent: Kazakh has exactly these nine vowels, and u (у) and i (и) are each a vowel combined with a glide rather than a vowel in their own right — which is why they pattern with the consonants when a suffix is chosen.

Harmony in action — the same suffix, two shapes

Where Kazakh is easier than Turkish

Turkish writes rounding harmony: the possessive is -ım / -im / -um / -üm, four forms chosen by both frontness and rounding.

Kazakh rounding harmony exists in speech but is not written. The possessive is spelled -ym (-ым) / -ım (-ім) — just two forms, chosen by frontness alone. Kazakhs pronounce something closer to a rounded vowel after a rounded root, but you never have to spell it.

Loanwords break harmony

Arabic, Persian and Russian loanwords break the rule and mix both sets: kıtap (кітап) "book" and qyzmet (қызмет) "service" from Arabic, botinka (ботинка) "boots" and kartoşka (картошка) "potato" from Russian.

Harmony still governs the suffixes you add to them, driven by the final syllable.

Keep going

← Turkish ↔ Kazakh Sound Laws · Numbers →

All Kazakh lessons

• The Alphabet — Read Kazakh without learning Cyrillic
• How the Letters Behave — The things spelling does not tell you
• Turkish ↔ Kazakh Sound Laws — Six rules that unlock hundreds of words for free
• Numbers — One to a thousand, and what a number does to the word after it
• Days of the Week — Saturday, and the days counted off it
• Months — Twelve names to learn outright
• Seasons — The four, and the weather that comes with them
• The Plural — One suffix, six written shapes
• Body Parts — From the top of the head to the sole of the foot, and the organs in between
• Personal Pronouns — Four ways to say "you", one word for "he" and "she"
• Possessive — The ending goes on the thing owned
• Family and Kinship — Lineages, generational ties, and reciprocal kinship
• The Copula — Saying "I am a teacher" with no verb at all
• Saying What Something Is Not — One extra word, and the personal ending moves onto it
• Asking a Question — One small word at the end, and nothing else moves
• Having and Not Having — No verb "to have" — only "there is" and "there is not"
• Where: the Locative — Location and time: one ending
• Where to: the Dative — Direction, destination, recipient, and purpose
• Where from: the Ablative — Starting points, origins, and standards of comparison
• Whose: the Genitive — Possession, definite noun phrases, and relationships
• What: the Accusative — The thing an action is done to — marked only when it is a particular one
• With: the Instrumental — Who you did it with, and what you did it with
• All Seven Together — What each ending marks, and every shape it takes
• Spatial Postpositions and Relational Nouns — Expressing position, direction and time with postpositions and relational nouns
• Verbs, Infinitives and Commands — From dictionary forms in {{-у}} to bare stems, commands and polite requests
• Simple Present Tense — Habitual actions, general facts and future intentions in {{-а / -е / -й}}
• Simple Past Tense — Witnessed and completed past actions in {{-ды / -ді / -ты / -ті}}
• Distant Past and Past Participle — Experienced past actions in {{-ған / -ген}} and conversational negation with {{жоқ}}
• Habitual Past and the "Used-To" Aspect — Expressing past routines in {{-атын / -етін / -йтын / -йтін}} and habitual participles
• Reported and Narrative Past — Hearsay, indirect evidence and surprise discoveries in {{-ыпты / -іпті / -пты / -пті}}
• The Present Continuous Tense — Ongoing actions and the four auxiliary verbs of physical stance
• Future Tenses — Definite intentions in {{-мақ / -мек}} and probable futures in {{-ар / -ер / -р}}
• Desires, Intentions and Optatives — Expressing wishes in {{-ғым келеді}} and making proposals in {{-айын / -айық}}
• Ability and Inability — Expressing "can" and "cannot" using converbs in {{-а / -е / -й}} and {{алу}}
• Conditionals and "If" Clauses — Real and hypothetical conditions in {{-са / -се}} and counterfactuals with {{еді}}
• Sequential Converbs and Action Chains — Linking consecutive actions in {{-ып / -іп / -п}} without repeating conjunctions
• Causative, Passive and Reflexive Verb Voices — Grammatical voice derivations in {{-дыр / -қыз / -т}}, {{-ыл / -іл}} and {{-ыс / -іс}}
• Necessity, Obligation and Possibility — Expressing "must", "need to" and "might" with {{керек}}, {{қажет}} and {{мүмкін}}
• Verb Differences & False Friends — How common Kazakh and Turkish verbs parted ways over time

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