Chapter 48 Vowel harmony in Chadic languages Mary Pearce & Joseph Lovestrand 48.1 Introduction There is no one-size-fits-all description of vowel harmony in Chadic languages. 1 Some Chadic languages exhibit constraints on phonological features throughout the word, and these patterns are often referred to in Chadic literature as prosodies (cf. Kenstowicz, chapter 25, this volume). Prosodies require the agreement in some feature between all of the vowels of a word, and in some languages can also include palatalization or labialization of consonants. In other Chadic languages, there are no word-level prosodies, and vowel harmony may be limited to one feature and only in syllables adjacent to a morpheme boundary. Chadic languages can be divided into four branches (Hammarström et al. 2021): • West Chadic (77 languages) • Central Chadic/Biu-Mandara (81 languages) • East Chadic (36 languages) • Masa (10 languages) The most complex prosody systems are found among Central Chadic languages. As discussed in Section 48.2, some Central Chadic languages are said to have no contrastive vowel qualities, deriving all of their phonetic vowels through word-level prosodies. However, as discussed in Section 48.3, the majority of Chadic languages, especially outside of Central Chadic, only exhibit height harmony and/or fronting and rounding harmony across a phonemic inventory of five to seven vowels, and some have no vowel harmony at all. Section 48.4 gives a more detailed look at this type of limited vowel harmony in one East Chadic language, Kera. Section 48.5 is a brief conclusion. 1 In many African languages, ATR harmony is the main type of harmony. That is rare in Chadic languages, but it is attested in Tangale, West Chadic (Jungraithmayr 1971; van der Hulst & van de Weijer 1995), and in a more limited domain in Dangla, East Chadic (Burke 1995: 23). Wolff (2021) uses the term “vowel harmonisation" to distinguish non-ATR feature sharing from ATR vowel harmony. In this chapter, “vowel harmony” is used more generally to refer to any type of vowel feature sharing.