Himalayan Linguistics

This paper attempts to discuss word formation in Thadou, a Tibeto-Burman language of the Kuki-Chin subgroup spoken by around 231, 200 (Lewis 2009) speakers of northeast India and Myanmar. This paper discusses three processes that are relevant for word formation in Thadou –affixation, compounding and reduplication. Thadou like the other Kuki-Chin languages of the region is an agglutinative language in which almost all the syllable boundary corresponds to morpheme boundary. Most words in Thadou tend to be largely monosyllabic, but even with bisyllabic words it is not difficult to segment the various morphemes which composed a bisyllabic word.