Language, Individual & Society, Volume 16, 2022

Abstract: As one of the European most mobile European nations due to migration, Latvia provides rich opportunities to trace identity changes through the revelation of an individual's experience. The study analyses the experience of transmitting Latvian as a heritage language in the emigrant families, emphasizing the importance of language as a carrier of ethnic identity, and with a special focus on language and identity transmission, viewed from a multi-generational perspective. The peculiarity of individual memories and experiences during generational change opens a new view of historical events as impulses for human reaction and action. From the theoretical point of view, the data is approached with reference to P.Bourdieu`s view on language skills as linguistic capital, a form of cultural capital. Knowledge of the language of the host country is one of the key skills for successful integration. In turn, knowledge of the mother tongue is an important dimension of ethnic identity and belonging and many of the migrants try to nourish their ethnic identity by preserving traditions and maintaining their mother tongue in the family and in the nearest social network. The data confirms the most important factors contributing to the preservation of the heritage language of emigrant children are parents who speak their mother tongue at home, as well as friends of the same ethnic background and supportive ethnic networks. The paper uses a combination of both large-scale quantitative longitudinal survey data and in-depth interviews with Latvian emigrants from the Latvian National Oral History Archive.