The main objective of this study was to investigate the Tigrigna language maintenancernamong the children born to the speakers of the language, residing in Addis. Thus, thernstudy examines whether the Tigrigna speaking community in Addis transfers theirrnlanguage to their children and maintained it among their children or not. The study alsornexamines the relationship between the children's competence in the language and theirrnethnic identity. To answer these questions, the children's proficiency in the language,rntheir language use, their identity and their attitudes towards the language wererninvestigated in a self-reported questionnaire filled by 126 children and in an interviewrnwith 16 parents. Accordingly, the study reveals that although most of the Tegaru parentsrnspeak their own language (Tigrigna) at home, the children are mostly using Amharic andrnare rapidly losing their ethnic language (Tigrigna). In addition, even though somernprevious literature suggests that ethnic identity and language ability are strongly related,rnthe findings from this study do not support this hypothesis. Instead, this study reveals thatrnthe relationship between ethnic identity and language ability of the children is negligiblernthat almost all of the respondents reported their strong feeling of identity and theirrnpositive attitude towards the language, despite their poor proficiency in it. The resultsrnfrom both the questionnaire and the interviews, therefore, indicate that the target childrenrnare in a language shift from Tigrigna to Amharic and the target language is notrnmaintained among the children of the target community. Finally, the study also points outrnthat if the Tigrina speaking community regards the language maintenance as desirable,rnthen explicit steps need to be taken.