At the beginning of the WWII, Latvia experienced a large wave of immigration. To survive, people were forced to leave their homes and loved ones, to break their usual linguistic habits in various favorite social spaces. Two 80-year-old women’s (one living in the USA, the other living in Australia now) memories that they confided in more than two hours of interviews (2023) give deeply personal insights to talk about the trauma of the loss of cultural space and multiple return experiences after that.

The paper discusses how individually important places, observations of language use, and language practices in Latvian cityscapes have been remembered and how these memories reflect socio-political transformations in Eastern Europe and changes in the communication of locals in Latvia as a (post-)Soviet country in different periods. The specific research questions include: (1) What forms the emotional attachment or alienation to cityscapes at different times? (2) What role do expectations play in this process?

Interview analysis lies within the framework of social semiotics (Van Leeuwen 2005) in that way that various representational, compositional, and interactional meanings related to certain social spaces and the use of languages will be explained. The analysis expands the scope of linguistic landscape research and deepens the less discussed concepts of the memory places, understood as the public spaces which engage with the mono-/multi-lingual realities of communities, and commemorative cityscape, understood as a constantly negotiated and re-negotiated spatial expression of the collective memory of the city inhabitants that is influenced by the socio-political and ideological factors at the national level (Blackwood & Macalister 2021; Mill 2023).