Abstract
Drawing on the perspective of simple language management, this presentation analyses code- switching in the language of thirteen first generation Czech Americans over the age of 60. These subjects left the country of their mother tongue after the events in Czechoslovakia in 1948 and 1968, respectively, in two dominant waves of political emigration and have been living out of Bohemia and Moravia for about a half a century.
The presentation analyses the situations of the semi-structured interviews (often with strong aspects of language autobiographies) in which the respondents leave for a variable, but typically short, period of time the dominant code of the conversation. Speakers during their interview in Czech, speaking to the Czech native speaker and student/lecturer of Czech language (and moreover, when being recorded, often for patriotic or professional reasons) tend to perceive the occurrence of any code switching as language problems.
Nevertheless, they always complete diverse phases of language management (on the scale from no signs of any notification of the language problem over signalization to the always self-initiated self-repair - using many various means). The presentation focuses on expressions without any formal changes, loanwords with Czech morphology features, reported speech, false friends, etc.
It demonstrates that the topic of the interview influences the frequency of code switching among respondents and it classifies the spheres of lexical items (army, institutions, policy etc.; usually connected with the new reality in the new state and significantly correlated with adulthood).