Sound Patterns in the Compound Words in Runyamigongo Dialect of Runyambo

This paper presents the phonological alterations involved in the formation of compound words in the Runyambo language. Runyambo is a Bantu language spoken in the northwestern part of Tanzania. Compounding is a rich morphological process that has been reported in different languages of the world. Despite the extensive body of research on compounding in other languages, there is little to no literature addressing this phenomenon in Runyambo. This paper focuses on Runyamigongo dialect of Runyambo discussing their morphophonological properties. The theory of lexical morphology is applied with data collected through extraction from written materials and elicitation techniques. The paper is qualitative in nature. A total of 2 informants were involved in focus group discussion. Secondary data were collected from the Runyambo-Kiswahili-English dictionary. It was found that compound words in Runyambo are formed at both stratum 1 and 2. Most compound words in Runyambo are formed at stratum 1 involving the changes in vowels like deletion, coalescence and gliding. Some were found to undergo more than one alteration. Most alterations result from the morphological and phonological alterations like deleting prefixes like augments and deleting some other vowels. It can generally be concluded that compounding is productive in Runyambo and despite the presence of a few compounds which do not exhibit any morphophonological alterations, most compounds show phonological alterations in their formation. This presents the morphophonological richness of the language.