Applied Linguistics and Language Analysis in Asylum Seeker ...

1 Applied Linguistics 26/4: 503 526 Oxford university Press 2005 Linguistics and LanguageAnalysis in Asylum Seeker CasesDIANA EADESU niversity of New England, AustraliaWhen Asylum seekers flee persecution or war in their home countries, theyoften arrive in a new country seeking Asylum , without documentation that canprove their nationality. They are thus open to the accusation that they are notactually fleeing persecution and/or war, but they are from another countryand they are merely seeking a better life . Indeed, among those who seekasylum there may well be some such people. Anyone arriving in such a waywithout a genuine fear of persecution in their home country cannot qualify forrefugee status.

2 In order to test nationality claims of Asylum seekers, a numberof governments are using Language Analysis , based on the assumption thatthe way that a person speaks contains clues about their origins. While linguistswould not dispute this assumption, they are disputing a number of otherassumptions, as well as practices, involved in this form of linguistic identifica-tion. This paper presents recent developments in this area of Applied Linguistics ,including the release of Guidelines by a group of linguists concerning the useof Language Analysis in such Asylum Seeker cases. It concludes with discussion ofthe role of Applied Linguistics in questions of national : Asylum Seeker ; refugee; Language Analysis ; linguistic identification;homogeneism; transcription; bilingualism; forensic Linguistics AND REAL-WORLD ISSUESThis paper presents recent developments in the application of linguisticwork to immigration issues, particularly concerning refugees, and specificallywithin the legal context of determining eligibility for refugee status throughvalidating (or invalidating) of nationality claims.

3 Such application oflinguistics to legal contexts comes within the scope of forensic Linguistics ,which I will first briefly the establishment of the International Association of ForensicLinguists (IAFL) in the early 1990s, the term forensic Linguistics isincreasingly being used broadly to refer to linguistic studies in legal contexts,and narrowly to refer to the presentation of linguistic Analysis as expertevidence in a court case. Both in its broad and narrow senses, forensiclinguistics has a concern with real-world 1issues such as the ways inwhich lawyers use Language in courtrooms to constrain, control, or coercethe evidence of witnesses ( Danetet al.)

4 1980; Matoesian 1993; Cotterill2003), or in the investigation of the identity of a person making athreatening phone call ( Labov 1988; Rose 2002).To date, most scholars who carry out linguistic research in legal contextshave not referred to themselves as Applied linguists. While the field ofapplied Linguistics has focused overwhelmingly on educational contextsand concerns, scholars who do forensic linguistic work find their strongestacademic connections ( in conferences and journals) with other linguists,and particularly sociolinguists. The writer is one of a number of linguistswho applaud the widening of the scope of Applied Linguistics to includestudies of Language in legal contexts, as evidenced in the recent specialissue ofApplied Linguistics (vol.

5 25, no. 4, 2004), and the inclusion of thispaper in this issue, as well as Gibbons (1999) and Eades (2003) in theAnnualReview of Applied forensic linguistic work has remained either within the academiccommunity, or within the legal community at the level of individual legalcases. But recently, a number of linguists working in this area have appliedtheir initial work in either the narrow or broad sense of forensic linguisticsto specific real-world problems in the legal context. An excellent example isthe work of John Gibbons on the wording of the police caution ( Mirandarights in the USA) in the Australian state of New South Wales.

6 For anumber of years in the 1980s and 1990s, Gibbons worked on individualcases to show that particular suspects of Non English Speaking Background(NESB) would have difficulty with the syntactic complexity of the policecaution ( Gibbons 1990).2 Gibbons went from work on individualcases to work with the police service in New South Wales in the late 1990son revising the wording of the police caution, reducing its linguisticcomplexity, partly by applying principles of the plain Language movement(Gibbons 2001). (This work also involved revisions to procedural guidelinesfor police interviews, which included guidelines about the use ofinterpreters).

7 Another forensic linguist whose work on individual cases led to amuch wider application to real-world problems in the law is AnnGraffam Walker. Following her linguistic work ( Walker 1993), Walker(1994) published theHandbook on Questioning Children: A linguistic Perspective,a definitive and accessible book which draws on a wealth of psychological,psycholinguistic, and sociolinguistic research to provide very specificguidelines for social workers, police, and lawyers who interview childrenin the legal forensic Linguistics has dealt with a number of aspects of criminaland civil law for the past two decades, the most recent legal area in whichlinguists are becoming involved is in immigration law, specifically in theuse of Language Analysis 3in the investigation of nationality claims of asylumseekers.

8 This paper outlines this involvement, focusing on areas of concernthat have arisen from specific cases, and shows the concerted action recentlyundertaken by an international group of linguists in producing a documententitledGuidelines for the Use of Language Analysis in Relation to Questions ofNational Origin in Refugee Cases( Language and National Origin Group 2004).504 Language Analysis IN Asylum Seeker CASEST hese Guidelines (as they will be referred to here) are reproduced at theend of this SEEKERSAt the end of 2003, there were estimated to be million refugees aroundthe world (UNHCR 2004a).

9 People who fear persecution in their homecountry and are seeking refugee status in another country are generallytermed Asylum seekers .4(Once their application for Asylum has beensuccessful, they are termed refugees .) The number of Asylum seekers inWestern Europe, australia , Canada, and the USA combined peaked at over800,000 in 1992 (Forced Migration Online (FMO) 2004). Despite publicdiscourse, which often asserts that the crisis is worsening, the number ofpeople seeking Asylum in industrialized countries in 2004 is the lowest inseventeen years (UNHCR 2004b).

10 There are several different ways in which an Asylum Seeker can claimrefugee status for example by approaching representatives of the UnitedNations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) in a country to whichthey have escaped,5or by arriving legally in a new country ( on a touristvisa or a student visa), and then requesting refugee status. But the mostpolitically contested way is to arrive without a visa in a new country oftenhaving paid huge amounts of money to a people-smuggler and then applyfor refugee status. Asylum seekers who arrive in this way often have nodocumented proof of nationality, such as a passport or birth antagonism in many countries to people who seek refugee statusin this way is often seen in the public discourse which asserts that suchpeople are not genuine refugees at all, but simply people seeking a better lifein a new country (often termed economic refugees ).