Welcome Aboard!

Hi everyone. I'm Eri. When I was kid, people used to call me "(U)jang", a Sundanese address term which might be literally translated as "brother". My family belongs to Sundanese, the second largest ethnic group in Indonesia . This entails I'm also Indonesian besides Sundanese. I speak both Sundanese and Indonesian and don't know which of both is my native language. I feel I have the intuition of both.

I was born and raised in a small town called Garut, which is located in the South of West Java. I grew up in a traditional village, called Pasanggrahan, where traditional religious schools are somehow more acceptable ( or even more priviledged) than the formal ones. So from early on, I received a great deal of religious education plus some formal Arabic grammar, which is required to allow me to understand very traditional Islamic books that are written in Arabic. This situation might have not have been quite the same by now. People might not give a great deal of  care to provide their children with any religious education anymore. Most religious schools, moreover, have been socially understated even in villages. 

As to my profession, I work for a state-owned university which primarily centers on teacher training. It used to be called IKIP (Institute of Pedagody and Teacher's Training) which has transformed itself into a university in 1999 and it's now called "Indonesia University of Education" (or Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia). I've served as a faculty member at the Department of English Education since 2005 after graduating in 2004. In 2006, I got nominated as one of the recipients of Australian Partnership Scholarships to pursue my masters at the University of Sydney. However, at the same time, I got awarded Fulbright Scholarship to pursue a master degree in the United States of America and then decided to take it after much careful thought.

I'm now a PhD student at the Department of Linguistics at the University of Iowa, US. This is an honor that I am given a chance to study more and pursue my interest of investigating the syntax of my languages, i.e. Sundanese and Indonesian in particular and Indonesian-type languages in general. Let's be hopeful everything will work out well.