ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on narratives of four Mongolian women. First, these women revisit their lived experiences as female academics, researchers, teachers and students from the Global South, and how their integration into the Global North as postgraduate students brought with it forms of overt and covert linguistic discrimination that threatened and suppressed their identity. They describe the process of adjusting to life in the Global North as well, and their return to Mongolia. While the women who have returned to Mongolia enjoy high status and upward social mobility, empowering them in the academic context of the Global South, the ones who decide to stay in Australia after their postgraduate studies often have the experience of starting from scratch, with their experience and qualifications at risk of being diminished or unacknowledged. Finally, they revisit the moments where negative and positive experiences pushed them to establish strong coping strategies to manage and negotiate their understanding of linguistic discrimination and linguistic diversity. They describe how these multiple experiences empowered them to fully enjoy all the fantastic dimensions of linguistic diversity they fully own.
