This paper discusses the sound change of oralization in the Mewahang language (Eastern Kiranti, Trans-Himalayan/Sino-Tibetan) spoken in eastern Nepal. The sound change of oralization turned syllable-final nasals into homorganic oral stops when followed by voiceless obstruents. This sound change constitutes a diagnostic innovation of Mewahang with regard to its closest relatives Lohorung and Yamphu. In this paper, the process of oralization in both compounding as well as derivational and inflectional morphology is described and illustrated with primary data collected in fieldwork. The explanatory potential of the sound change for synchronic peculiarities in the verbal morphology and morphophonology is discussed, and an overview of exceptions to the sound change is provided.

Stem alternation is present in the verbal inflection of all documented Kiranti languages, where it ranges from the straightforward phonologically conditioned (e.g. Athpariya and Chintang) to the purely morphological and baroque (e.g. Khaling and Dumi). This paper surveys stem alternation patterns across the whole family. Its main finding is that, unlike the morphological stem alternations of West Kiranti, the phonologically-conditioned stem alternations of East Kiranti are characterized by a very striking distributional similarity (often identity) across languages, even in the presence of quite drastic affixal changes. This and other findings suggest that these stem alternation patterns should be regarded as a (morphomic) grammatical phenomenon of its own right, despite being derivable from the forms of suffixes. Furthermore, comparison with West Kiranti suggests that this coextensiveness with a coherent phonological environment actually enhances some typically morphomic traits such as diachronic resilience and productivity.