Language and Linguistics 'Brown Bag Lunch Talk': Week 17 with Professor Peter Patrick, University of Essex

ABSTRACT

Language Analysis for Determination of Origin (abbreviated LADO) includes linguistic analysis of various types, applied at the request of governments to assess the validity of asylum seekers’ (AS) claims of national origin. 
 
For some years now I have been struggling with how linguists and their allies might raise standards of linguistic and forensic practice in LADO. This talk will review some recent developments which may or may not help to achieve that goal, and will walk you through the path of an asylum seeker whose language identity is being challenged.
 
LADO has been performed for a quarter century, but only for the last decade have linguists been systematically involved in both performing it and critiquing it, and little research has yet been done that directly bears on it. 
Since it is not a research-driven enterprise nor one in which linguists play the leading role, the drivers have largely been external forces: legal casework and precedent, profit motives and commissioning practices, mass media scrutiny, government policy, and changes in the international refugee situation. 
In this talk I reflect upon some of these drivers, and the effects they are having on the practice of LADO, from the point of view of an academic linguist who has been involved in three principal ways since 2003: 
•        as a contributor to a brief but highly influential set of guidelines for practice (Language & National Origin Group 2004), 
•        as a co-organiser of many meetings, and speaker to many forums, concerned with LADO (often involving participants who are not linguists and hold folk views of language), and 
•        as an expert consultant evaluating over 85 government-commissioned LADO reports which are appealed in the UK asylum tribunals. 
Language and National Origin Group. 2004. Guidelines for the use of language analysis in relation to questions of national origin in refugee cases. In Eades, Diana & Jacques Arends, eds. 2004. Language Analysis and Determination of Nationality. International Journal of Speech, Language & the Law 11(2): 261-66. https://www.tinyurl.com/ladoguidelines 
 
Peter L. Patrick, Monika Schmid and Karin Zwaan (eds.). Fc 2019. Language Analysis for the Determination of Origin (Springer).