This is Randi Hacker with another Postcard from Asia from the KU Center for East Asian Studies.

Many world languages contain masculine and feminine words with all that pesky adjective and article agreement that goes along with it. Some languages bypass gender altogether: English, for example, and Chinese. And then there’s Mongolian. Mongolian takes the concept of gender to an entirely different level by assigning gender to vowels. Fraternization among vowels of different genders in a single word is not done: there is no such thing as a co-ed word. Thus if the first vowel in a word is masculine, every other vowel in that word must also be masculine. Ditto with feminine vowels. This is called vowel harmony. Oh, by the way, there are two neutral vowels with no gender loyalty whatsoever: You might say that they play for both teams.

From the Center for East Asian Studies, this is Randi Hacker. Wish you were here.