The North East Indian Linguistics Society (NEILS) was set up in order to address several local concerns with global implications. The foremost among these concerns is undoubtedly to provide an indigenous forum where students of language and linguistics and researchers working on one or more of the numerous languages of the region could regularly meet and exchange ideas.

The potential relevance for a forum of this kind hardly needs to be laboured. Every year, especially during the winter season, linguists from home and abroad spend a few months or weeks in various parts of the North East, documenting languages and collecting linguistic data before analyzing, describing and writing up the results in the tranquility of their home institutions. However, there has been virtually no context or opportunity for meetings with local academic faculty or researchers. To some of us, this was an extraordinary situation, given that there are advantages for visiting and local researchers alike to be able to meet and to explore and develop areas of mutual concern: for the various universities located in the North East, field visits by international researchers represent a potential opportunity to build capacity among their own researchers through creating an ambient environment for both sides to meet. For the international researchers, meetings with local scholars create opportunities for database-expansion, collaboration, and enrichment of their project's perspective.