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CHAPTER 7 FINDINGS The metalinguistic function of code-switching can be observed when “comments are made directly or indirectly about the languages involved”*™. In this utterance, the speaker makes a comment on her own code-switching strategies. She explains why she sometimes code-switches to English from Hungarian. She explains that one reason for her code-switching to English is linguistic economy, that is, she switches to English when the English word seems more ‘economical’ because it is shorter than its Hungarian equivalent. To illustrate her explanation, she cites the English word, trunk, as the shorter equivalent of the Hungarian ‘csomagtartd’. The switch to English, hence, serves as a metalinguistic comment, a linguistic illustration to reinforce the point about her code-switching tendencies. (m) Identity Example [40] 1 G1F51,80 “.. ott sziilettiink, ott nevelkedtiink, de we are Americans.” (... we were born there, we grew up there, but we are Americans.) (source: data collected by Kovács in 2008—2009) De Fina claims that “among the strategies that have the greatest role in indexing ethnicity, language use appears to be the most important”*”. The extract above shows how code-switching functions as the most economically and readily available discursive device of expressing identity. In this utterance, the speaker talks about her life, and she says that although she was born and grew up in Hungary, now she feels that she is an America. She begins her utterance in Hungarian, then she switches to English to say that they (together with her husband) are now Americans. The switch to English, therefore, accentuates the force of the statement that despite her Hungarian roots, now she identifies herself as an American. (n) Clarification Example [41] 1 GIF51,79 “*... mindig ott gyakoroltunk abban a gimnäziumban, abban a high 2 schoolban, ahol ő tanított, és nagyon sok szép emlék fűz hozzá, 305 John Karras, Greek-English code-switching, Calgary Working Papers in Linguistics, 17 (1995), 59 306 De Fina, Code-switching and the construction of ethnic identity, Language in Society, 379 * 164 +
