Himalayan Linguistics

This paper attempts to discuss the different processes of word formation in contemporary Liangmai, a Tibeto-Burman (TB) language of the Kuki-Chin-Naga sub group (Bradley 1997). The language is spoken by around 50,000 speakers in the state of Manipur and Nagaland, in the northeastern part of India. This paper discusses a detailed description of the word formation processes that are relevant in Liangmai, namely affixation, compounding and reduplication. Like the other TB languages of the region, Liangmai is an agglutinative language in which almost all the syllable boundary corresponds to morpheme boundary. Most of the Liangmai words are monosyllabic. In the case of disyllabic/polysyllabic words, various morphemes which composed the word are easily segmentable.