| Abstract
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This research explores the socially embedded experiences of four adults who migrated in childhood and maintain their mother tongue while acquiring and appropriating a second language and way of being in the world. The participants in this inquiry, from Somalia, Peru, Hong Kong and Latvia, are from diverse linguistic, cultural, ethnic and religious backgrounds. They have maintained their mother tongues and cultures to varying degrees since childhood. The inquiry is situated in the field of minority bilingualism and multicultural education and is rooted in the researcher's own experience of migration. The researcher employs an arts-informed life history approach, within a social constructionist and social interactionist framework to explore the phenomenon of minority mother tongue maintenance. This research investigates the complex and multilayered life histories of childhood immigrants and refugees who became and are bilingual, the multiple-totality of their experiences, within particular social contexts. It focuses on the ongoing process of reconciling languages, cultures, and identities that is at the centre of the process of mother tongue maintenance, in the research participants' lives. Particular attention is given to the social contexts, power relations and personal experiences that shape these processes, including the diversity of diasporic experiences, through language, culture, ethnicity, race and religion. This research offers an in-depth view of the complexities of the childhood immigrant and refugee experience in and through languages and cultures, in the Canadian context, and the significance and centrality of minority languages and cultures in their lives, in their well being and success. The research text combines stories of experience, poetry, collage and academic discourse, allowing for diverse ways of engaging with and understanding the phenomena explored. It portrays the heterogeneity of personal experiences of minority languages, cultures, ethnicities and religions in an increasingly diverse society, experiences that disrupt existing monologic and homogenizing perspectives, while being influenced by them. Viewing individual experience as a window into broader social conditions, the experiences explored provide an in-depth view of the people Canadians are becoming, and demonstrate the moral imperative of engaging in culturally and linguistically responsive pedagogy in multicultural societies such as Canada.
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