Dr. Bikram Jora serves as the Living Tongues Regional Coordinator for South Asia. He has been working with the organization since 2010 and is located in Ranchi, India. He received his PhD in Linguistics from Delhi University in 2014. Dr. Jora began working in the field of language documentation because he saw the social exclusion that members of minority cultures experienced in India, and he wanted to show that nondominant languages are not obsolete. His favorite parts of language documentation are learning the morphology and the structure of the language.

In his ten years with Living Tongues Institute, Dr. Jora has worked on many language projects, including the current large-scale Birhor documentation project funded by the Zegar Family Foundation. Dr. Jora has helped lead a number of field trips to Munda-speaking communities throughout his home state of Jharkhand, and also in Odisha, where the majority of Munda speakers are found. This includes surveys of Bhumij, Ho, Santali, Kharia, Kera’ Mundari and Tamaria Mundari communities. He has also taken part in field expeditions with Dr. Gregory Anderson to Arunachal Pradesh to document the Koro Aka, Hruso Aka, Bangru, Puroik and Sartang languages. He has presented his research in linguistics conferences in Indonesia, Japan, India and other places around the world.