Dr Mark W. Post is a linguist specializing in the languages of mainland Asia, with a special focus on Indigenous languages of the Eastern Himalayan region. He is author and/or editor of 10 books, including A Grammar of Galo, The Tangam Language, A Galo-English Dictionary, Language and Culture in Northeast India and Beyond, and 5 volumes of the North East Indian Linguistics book series, in addition to dozens of academic papers. Post has been actively involved in community language work in the Eastern Himalayan region for more than a decade, through partnerships with the Galo Language Development Committee, the Apatani Language Development Committee, and the Milang Welfare Society. The CCLD has grown out of his work with Dr Yankee Modi, with whom he founded Training and Resources for Indigenous Community Linguists in 2015. Post is currently Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Sydney.
Dr Yankee Modi / Co-Director
Dr Yankee Modi is one of the world’s foremost community linguists, representing the Milang community of Holon Village in Arunachal Pradesh, India. Previously Assistant Professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Modi completed her PhD thesis A Grammar of Milang in 2017 at the University of Berne under supervision of Prof. Dr. George van Driem, and was shortlisted for the 2019 Pāṇini Award. The CCLD has grown around Modi’s collaborations with Mark W. Post, which began with a fieldtrip to Peki-Modi village in 2008. Co-Director of the CCLD, Modi is also a Tutor and Associate Lecturer at the University of Sydney Department of Linguistics.
Asst Prof Zilpha Modi / Associate Program Director
Zilpha Modi is an anthropologist at the Institute of Tribal Studies in Rajiv Gandhi University, Arunachal Pradesh, India. She holds an MA from Jawaharlal Nehru University and an MPhil from Oxford University, and has conducted extensive fieldwork among Yobin (Lisu) communities in far eastern Arunachal Pradesh. An Indigenous member of the Milang tribe and native speaker of Adi, Modi has served as Associate Program Director within Training and Resources for Indigenous Community Linguists since its inception in 2015.
Dr Kellen Parker Van Dam / Associate Academic Director
Dr. Kellen Parker van Dam is a linguist specializing in the languages of East and Southeast Asia. His primary research interests are in historical linguistics and documentation, with additional interest in minority language representation regarding planning and policy. He is currently an editor of Languages and People’s of Languages and Peoples of the Eastern Himalayan Region, an annual special issue of the journal Himalayan Linguistics. In addition to academic work, Kellen has been involved in Training and Resources for Indigenous Community Linguists since 2019, and is one of the creators of Phonemica, a crowd-sourced platform for linguistic documentation and the preservation of oral histories from many of Mainland Asia’s linguistic communities. He is currently a researcher at the University of Zürich in the Department of Comparative Language Science.