Exploring Socio-Political Dimensions of Heritage Language Maintenance: The Case of Vietnamese Speakers in Montréal.

This article investigates heritage language (HL) maintenance among Montreal's Vietnamese diaspora, focusing on how families' reasons for emigration—predominantly political turmoil versus economic hardship—affect second-generation Vietnamese language retention. The study involved 38 parent–child pairs, assessing parents' ethnolinguistic identity and children's Vietnamese speaking skills, social networks, and communication-related stress. Findings indicate that while all second-generation participants maintained some Vietnamese ability, children of political immigrants generally exhibited stronger HL skills than those of economic immigrants. Moreover, the associations between HL maintenance and factors such as parental pride, social network characteristics, and acculturative stress differed notably between the two groups, suggesting that socio-political contexts of emigration shape heritage language development in complex ways.