Testing the Claims of Asylum Seekers: The Role of Language Analysis

Abstract

Language tests in immigration contexts typically perform a gate-keeping role in decisions about whether an applicant should be granted residence or citizenship in a new country. In refugee contexts, so-called language tests or language analyses also play a gate-keeping role, but a more ambitious one; namely that of providing answers to questions concerning the genuineness or honesty of asylum seekers' claims about their origins, whether national, regional, or ethnic. That is, the way that an asylum seeker speaks in an interview with immigration officials is analysed or assessed to help in the determination of whether to accept this person's claims about their origins. It is this assessment of language that is the subject of this article, in which I will explain the methods used and then highlight some problems that have been addressed by linguists. The acronym LADO is used to refer to such “language analysis” used for the determination of origin, but it should be understood that much of the “language analysis” in this area appears quite superficial ¹ .

¹The term LingID has also been used; e.g. Eades et al. (2003).

Acknowledgments

The author is grateful to Helen Fraser, Peter Patrick, and Jeff Siegel for helpful comments on drafts of this article and some additional references. Two anonymous reviewers also provided useful feedback. All remaining errors are the author's responsibility.

Notes

¹The term LingID has also been used; e.g. Eades et al. (2003).

²Information on this case comes from the decision of the Refugee Review Tribunal (RRT, 2000).

³Note, however, that Urdu is also spoken in Afghanistan (Grimes, 1992).

⁴Organised by De Taalstudio as part of the Joint Summer Meeting of the Society of Pidgin and Creole Linguistics (SPCL) and the Associação de Crioulos de Base Lexical Portuguesa e Espanhola (ACBLPE); see http://www.taalstudio.nl/taalanalyse/index_uk.html.

⁵Organised by Helen Fraser in consultation with this author, as part of the Forensic Speaker Recognition Workshop hosted by the Human Communication Science Network; see http://www-personal.une.edu.au/∼hfraser/nativespeaker.htm

⁶See for example Blackledge (2005), Blommaert (1999), Makoni and Pennycook (2005), Maryns (2005), Piller (2001), and Silverstein (1996). Blommaert points out (1999: 428) that Hymes refers to this as “a ‘Herderian’ conception of the world composed of traditional units of language-and-culture” (citing Hymes 1996: 25).

⁷ Maryns (2006: 254) reported that this kind of translation test is used “by several asylum agencies in Europe”.

⁸In this example the asylum seeker had heard the interviewer's request to translate the word “sheep” as a request for “ship” (Corcoran 2004: 214).

⁹For example, the Australian government's decision to pay the Indonesian government to divert boats carrying asylum seekers has resulted in a greatly reduced number of such undocumented arrivals in Australia from the Middle East (see Brennan, 2003: 6). While there were 1277 such arrivals in 2001–2, there were none in 2002–3, and only 82 people (in a total of three boats) in 2003–4 (DIMIA, 2004: 73). And while recent asylum seekers arriving by boat have been from West Papua, no questions were raised about their country of origin. Secondly, political pressure within the Australian government during 2005 resulted in considerably accelerated processing of asylum seekers, and it is likely that this bureaucratic change resulted in fewer decisions to call for language analysis from the overseas private companies to whom all such Australian work is contracted.