Date created: | Last Updated:

Category: Project

Description: Certain phonotactic constraints on the co-occurrence of segments, such as vowel harmony and consonant anti-harmony, appear to be much more common across the world's languages than others. Vowel anti-harmony and consonant harmony, for example, appear to be exceedingly uncommon. These tendencies suggest that vowels and consonants interact within words in opposite ways -- similar vowel pairs tend to co-occur, while similar consonant pairs tend to be avoided. However, evidence of this so far only comes from studies of individual languages or families. Using Bayesian negative binomial regression, we investigate patterns of co-occurrence in vowels and consonants in 107 languages across 21 families and find that the differences between consonant and vowel effects identified in the literature are near-universals across languages. Furthermore, we find evidence that consonant co-occurrence effects are consistently larger than vowel co-occurrence effects, and weak evidence of a trade-off between vowel and consonant co-occurrence effects.