it. Vowel harmony is lost in the Northern and Southern dialects, as well as in the Surgut dialect of Eastern Khanty. Mari Most varieties of the Mari language have vowel harmony. Erzya The Erzya language has a limited system of vowel harmony, involving only two vowel phonemes: (front) versus (back). Moksha, the closest relative of Erzya, has no phonemic vowel harmony, though has front and back allophones in a distribution similar to the vowel harmony in Erzya. Finnic languages Vowel harmony is found in most of the Finnic languages. It has been lost in Livonian and in Standard Estonian, where the front vowels ü ä ö occur only in the first (stressed) syllable. South Estonian Võro (and Seto) language as well as some [North] Estonian dialects, however, retain vowel harmony. Finnish In the Finnish language, there are three classes of vowelsfront, back, and neutral, where each front vowel has a back vowel pairing. Grammatical endings such as case and derivational endingsbut not encliticshave only archiphonemic vowels U, O, A, which are realized as either back or front inside a single word. From vowel harmony it follows that the initial syllable of each single (non-compound) word controls the frontness or backness of the entire word. Non-initially, the neutral vowels are transparent to and unaffected by vowel harmony. In the initial syllable: a back vowel causes all non-initial syllables to be realized with back (or neutral) vowels, e.g. pos+ahta+(t)a → posahtaa a front vowel causes all non-initial syllables to be realized with front (or neutral) vowels, e.g. räj+ahta+(t)a → räjähtää. a neutral vowel acts like a front vowel, but does not control the frontness or backness of the word: if there are back vowels in non-initial syllables, the word acts like it began with back vowels, even if they come from derivational endings, e.g. sih+ahta+(t)a → sihahtaa cf. sih+ise+(t)a → sihistä For example: kaura begins with back vowel → kauralla kuori begins with back vowel → kuorella sieni begins without back vowels → sienellä (not *sienella) käyrä begins without back vowels → käyrällä tuote begins with back vowels → tuotteessa kerä begins with a neutral vowel → kerällä kera begins with a neutral vowel, but has a noninitial back vowel → keralla Some dialects that have a sound change opening diphthong codas also permit archiphonemic vowels in the initial syllable. For example, standard 'ie' is reflected as 'ia' or 'iä', controlled by