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*. I would like to thank the Research Council of Norway (SAMKUL) for funding this research.
INTRODUCTION
This article investigates linguistic diversity, migration, and labour in one particular historical case. The background setting is Finnmark County in northern Norway in the nineteenth century. Situated north of the Arctic Circle, in the northernmost periphery of Europe, and only sparsely populated, the region has been multilingual for centuries. As in other parts of Europe, the nineteenth century was an era of major social, cultural, and political changes, such as the emergence of nation-states, industrialisation, and rapidly increasing geographical and occupational mobility. Rising nationalism and modernism put diversity and multilingual traditions under pressure.
The article examines the language policies and linguistic and discursive practices surrounding the region's first large industrial enterprise, a copper mine by a remote fjord near today's town of Alta. The British directors of the Alten Copper Works (ACW) recruited a diverse workforce that consisted almost exclusively of migrants: miners and expert workers from southern Scandinavia and Cornwall and, not least, a large number of Kven from northern Finland and Sweden.
For several reasons, the ACW and its mining population are an exciting case for investigating language policies and practices in a historical workplace setting. First, the mine was situated in the multilingual periphery of Scandinavia during a transition period from prenationalist to nationalist politics. Several ethnolinguistic groups had been living multilingually side-by-side. Now, the Norwegian state introduced systematic assimilation policies.
Second, the ACW displays many of the same relationships between capital, workers, state, and community as many mining enterprises today. Because many natural resources are found in peripheral regions, mining requires the mobility of workers, often profiting from social and economic problems in other regions (e.g. Godoy 1985; Bell 2012; Heller, Bell, Daveluy, McLaughlin, & Noël 2016). Typically, the capital is situated somewhere else in the global economy, outside the legislation of the territory where the resources are extracted (Hechter 1975; Ballard & Banks 2003). As in our case, mining in peripheral regions often involves minorities or indigenous groups (Godoy 1985; Ballard & Banks 2003). These relationships correlate with centre-periphery relationships and sociolinguistic relations, and they are organised and mobilised in discourse.
Third, in an era of political, cultural, economic, and technological changes,...