Himalayan Linguistics

This study aims to discuss about word structure of the Boro, Garo, Rabha, Dimasa and Kokborok languages spoken in the North Eastern states of India. These languages fall under the Tibeto-Burman sub-family of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. There are linguistic affinities at all levels of structure among these languages. The basic vocabulary is mostly monosyllabic. More than one monosyllabic word (that is free morpheme) may be joined together as constituent to derive a new word or to form a compound word. It is a common phenomenon in the process of word formation. These languages do not possess the use of infix. An inflectional or derivational word may be formed by adding prefix or suffix (es). Suffixes may be agglutinated one after the other in a sequence to denote extended meaning (s). These are the common salient features occurring in word formation process among the Boro, Garo, Rabha, Dimasa and Kokborok languages. In this paper, chiefly the word formation process will be analyzed from structural point of view taking into consideration the grammatical categories nouns and adjectives.