Hannah Pritchett, a senior in linguistics, was awarded a J. William Fulbright Student Grant in the amount of $11,000 from the United States Department of State and the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board.

Pritchett will use her grant to study linguistics and teach conversational English in Semarang, Indonesia for one year. Having lived in Indonesia during high school for two years, she is looking forward to returning to a country she said she loves.

Pritchett will research and study the relationship between the country's official language, Bahasa Indonesian, and the more common language, Javanese. She will observe how the two languages are used among native and non-native speakers, especially among young people.

"Do they use both? Is there code-switching? I want to do research on how they use it," she said in a news release.

Pritchett completed the strenuous process of applying for the grant in a month, a process that usually takes five to six months.

"The grant itself is tremendously exciting," Pritchett said. "I hope that it will be an avenue for future research."

Following her year in Indonesia, Pritchett plans on doing graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley.

Pritchett will be one of more than 1,200 U.S. citizens to travel and study abroad for the 2006-2007 academic year through Fulbright programs. Established in 1946, the program selects recipients based on academic or professional achievement to support mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the rest of the world. The Fulbright program operates in more than 150 countries worldwide.

source: http://newsnet.byu.edu

By Catherine Romney