**Research background** This research is of ethnographic orientation, and the data is informed by participant observations and informal interviews collected over several fieldwork trips to Kirkenes in 2018-2020.The focus lies on the role of Russian in the region and lifetime trajectories of multilingual speakers regarding language learning as personal investment into a change in their quality of life. Two groups of speakers interest me in particular, one - Norwegians, Sami and Kven speakers who learn Russian, and two, Russian speakers who invest into learning Norwegian, Sami or Kven. By the change in their quality life I mean wider employment opportunities, larger economic gains, access to wider cultural resources, and the overall improvement of the quality of life. **Research questions** The broad purpose of the research project is to see how the knowledge and insights into multilingual practices in Northern Norway may help build peaceful neighbouring policy across other borderlands in Europe. **Research design and methods** The research design includes an analysis of *Linguistic Landscape* of the Kirkenes area, informed by follow-up *interviews* with Russian and Norwegian speakers and participant observations of interactions in shops and streets of Kirkenes. *Language diaries* and *language portraits* were employed at the following stages of the project. The researcher creates notes for each stage of implementing a particular method. All together, these methods will contribute to a nexus analysis (Scollon and Scollon 2004) of multilingualism in the area. Nexus analysis was chosen as a methodological approach, as it focuses on what people manage to do with their language, i.e. on people’s actions rather than on their competences. Each social action (e.g. speaking, reading or writing) was analysed as a result of (1) a history of events/actions/practices; (2) the type of interactions the action is linked with, and (3) the discourses connected to the action. The research design combined bibliographic, ethnographic and biographic research. *Linguistic landscape* The method consists in registering all examples of written language on display or readily available in public spaces across the area: signage, ads and posters, leaflets, notices, etc. The researcher pays attention both to the material aspects of artefacts and to where they are placed. The method provides a glimpse on the dominant registers of different languages, and allows to make guesses of possible authors. It also highlights absences from the public spaces in terms of actors, languages, registers and discourses. *Language portrait* It represents a reflection, by research participants, on the roles of different languages in their lives and in the lives of their communities, allowing to identify both language attitudes and ideologies as well as their meaning across the person's lifespan. The procedure for language portraits was as follows: a template with a human figure was presented to a participant who would be then be invited to place somehow all the languages in their lives onto the template, using writing implements like pens and coloured pencils. The whole process, starting from presenting the template with instructions to filling it out by a participant was audio-recorded, to be processed at a later stage. So it combines both a produced artefact and an interview. *Language diary* Language diaries are meant to get an idea of how the different languages the person speaks get distributed across their week and social interactions. They were introduced in two steps: first, the researcher would present the participant with a bilingual (Norwegian-Russian) template where activities of reading-writing-speaking and listening were distributed around the day (morning-day-evening). The template covered a week, and the participants were invited to fill out the template for at least 4 days (2 weekdays and 2 weekend days). The participants would fill their language diaries in their free time without being observed by the researcher. Once the diary was filled out, the participants would send it to the researcher via email and we would schedule an interview to go over the completed diary. The follow-up interaction was recorded either in researcher notes or via audio-recorder. *Interview* A question guide for interviews was developed where questions had been grouped into themes: e.g. languages, public spaces, workplace, family, changes and future, border. In this way, the guide can be used in a semi-structured interview, allowing the researcher to keep track of the themes while being able to regroup them to match the interests of the research participant in the actual interview. The order of presenting the three research methods was flexible and determined by each of the participants: some preferred to do the interview first, followed by the language portrait and language diary; others wanted to start off with the language portrait and proceed to the interview and language diary. **Glossary** *New Speakers* - adults who invest in particular linguistic resources and build their repertoires to enable them to “cross existing social boundaries, re-evaluate their own levels of linguistic competence and creatively (re)structure their social practices to adapt to new and overlapping linguistic spaces” (O’Rourke, Pujolar). The concept of New speaker has been created to challenge the native vs. non-native divide and to focus on the active investment speakers make into their language learning. Three categories of New speakers have been analysed so far resulting from revitalisation, immigration and transnational mobility. All those speaker categories are present in the multilingualism in Northern Norway and in the Kirkenes area: 1) revitalisation - Kven and Sami speakers; 2) immigration - estimated 10% Russian speakers live in the area, apart from people from Sweden, Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, US, Australia, Philippines, Thailand, Pakistan, Venezuela, Colombia, Eritrea and Syria; 3) transnational workers - globally operating companies such as, for ex. shipping companies and ports, transfer their employees from different countries. Relevant language training is usually secured by the company. *BEAR - Barents Euro-Arctic Region*, established in 1993 as a transnational cooperation project between Northern Norway, Finland, Sweden and two oblasts in Russia. The main interest has been for Norwegian-Russian cooperation in oil and gas resources. Over the years, the project has created a class of transnational activists and stakeholders, the so-called Barents elites. Because of its powerful impact across different spheres of life and society in the region, “Barents” is used widely by local enterprises, NGOs, media and research institutes. It was BEAR that placed the mining town of Kirkenes on the map of transnational industrial, cultural and educational cooperation as well as of global tourism. Some examples of the use of Barents in the local branding is provided by the regional newspaper Barents Observer; the research institutes - Barents Secretariat and Barents Institute, and the greatest annual cultural festival that takes place in Kirkenes every February - Barents Spektakel. The latest edition of Barents Spektakel (February 2019) had the following slogan: “Kirkenes - the northernmost Chinatown” jointly organised by local NGOs and art collectives such as Pikene pa Broen [Girls on the Bridge] and Samovar Theatre. *Finnmark* - county in Northern Norway, further divided into Western Finnmark and Eastern Finnmark. The town of Kirkenes is situated in Sor-Varanger [South Varanger] municipality in Eastern Finnmark. Norwegian (in the Bokmal version) is a state language and Sami (North Sami variety) is the official language in Finnmark county. Kven language (Baltic Finnish) has been reinstated as a minority language in the county. Last year, the Finnmark county merged with the Troms one, thus consolidating the position of Sami languages in terms of language policies. *Language revitalisation programmes* - Kirkenes and the borderland area is the site for two ongoing language minority revitalisation programmes: for North Sami languages (Level III of Protection by the Charter for Language) and for Kven (Level II), according to its recently recognised language minority status (2005). Skolt Sami and Ter Sami of the Eastern Sami branch (associated with the conversion into the Orthodox religion), once spoken in the area, are considered obsolete. Both Sami and Kven are classified as endangered languages in the area. *Bokmal and Nynorsk* - two official norms within Norwegian language in use across the different groups of Norwegian society. Bokmal [Book Language] is stereotypically associated with the urban way of life, technology, fashion, pop culture, whereas Nynorsk [New Norwegian] is commonly attributed to traditional and regional culture. Nowadays there is a strong movement towards promoting the use of Nynorsk in science and technology alongside Bokmal. In schools, printed materials in both versions are used. Decisions as to the form of Norwegian to be used in oral instruction are made at the classroom level, being oriented towards the students’ needs. In Kirkenes, Bokmal is the main standard for instruction. *Languages at schools:* Schooling in Sami and Finnish is available. Russian language teaching is represented by two branches: 1) Russian as a foreign language, which is quite popular among secondary school students and adult learners in Kirkenes due to the proximity of the border; and 2) Russian as a heritage language provided as a parent-run private initiative on a weekly basis. *The Norwegian Place Name Act* (1990 with amendments of 2005) - official toponymic guidelines for map and signage that regulate the spelling and use of other languages apart from Norwegian in placenames. In Finnmark county, three names should be used in tables, registers, on signs and maps (Norwegian, Sami and Kven). For Kven, the standardisation has not been finished by the Kven Language Assembly. Dialectal differences may also be reflected on maps. *Norwegianisation policy* - the oppressive and coercive language policy of the new Norwegian state (1850s-1950s) which conditioned the access to education, citizenship and land ownership to the mastery of Norwegian (in its Bokmal version) by language minorities. Instruction in Sami and Kven was forbidden in schools up to 1959; Sami languages were introduced into primary education in 1967; instruction in Kven was implemented much later (2000s) and is suffering from the lack of teaching materials and teachers. *Sydvaranger mine* - iron ore mine, the town-forming enterprise in Kirkenes area; a major local employer throughout the1900s-1990s which has gone through several cycles of bankruptcy and reopening. Having been established with German, Swedish and Norwegian private capital, in 2019 the mine is reopening again thanks to the USA investors of the Orion Mine Finance as part of the Tschudi global network, operating in Angola, Baltic states and Scandinavia. The new ambition is to construct a rail port in Kirkenes connected to the Russian Railways (Murmansk-Nikel Railway). Major customers of the iron ore products processed at the Sydvaranger mine have been Tata and ArcelorMittal in Europe, Bahrain Steel and Chinese steel mills (up to 2015). Orion group has partners in the USA, Australia, UK and Cayman islands. *Nikel, Pechenga and Zapolyarny* - industrial towns just across the border from Kirkenes, belonging to the Murmansk oblast in Russian Federation. Over the years, apart from the cooperation within the Barents agreement, these towns have become associated in the borderland area with different types of environmental concerns. Besides this, since 2012, these towns came into the *border resident agreement* with Norway (and Finland), which meant flexibilisation of visa regimes for the borderland inhabitants within 50 km-radius from the border. Over the years these towns have provided a steady flow of weekend shoppers in Kirkenes. Overall, cross-border mobility and intermarriages increased. *Pechenga region* used to be part of Finland (1920-1940) called Petsamo in Finnish, and was annexed by the Soviet Union as a result of the Winter War. During the World War II, Kirkenes was the occupied by the Nazi as a stronghold against the Soviet military bases in Murmansk. There were several prisoners of war camps in town; Soviet-trained Norwegian partisans were active in the area. The town of Kirkenes was heavily bombed; in fact, it is the second most-bombed site of the WWII after Malta. Kirkenes was liberated by the Soviet troops in the Kirkenes-Petsamo operation on October 25, 1944. *Soviet Liberation Monument*, aka Russian Monument - is one of several war monuments in the Kirkenes area that commemorates the liberation from the Nazi. Centrally located, it is the site of the annual celebration with participation of official delegations from Norway and Russia. *Orthodox Church* - in the borderland area including Kirkenes, this religious institution has been present throughout the history of the region, as large numbers of Skolt and Ter Sami were Orthodox converts (some scholars [Nils Christie] state that the Sami oppression was motivated on religious grounds). The Sami Orthodox chapel of Saint George in Neiden is one of the earliest religious buildings in Norway (1565). During the Russian Empire, religious rather than language factor formally determined the subject identity. Currently modern Orthodox Church is operating across the Russian diaspora.