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Panelist Hetty ter Haar |
Forensic Language Analysis in Asylum Applications of African Refugees: Fallou Ngom, Western Washington University Asylum applications have increased in
many Western countries as the result of the wars, poverty, population
displacements and migrations from Africa and other parts of the world.
While many people apply for asylum for genuine reasons, some use the
asylum procedure to immigrate to the West by claiming that they come
from a country whose citizens are normally granted asylum. In cases
where the applicants’ origin and claims are doubtful, many Western
governments now use language analyses to determine whether the (socio)
linguistic features in the applicants’ speech are consistent
with the patterns typically found in the speech communities where they
claim to be from. However, this type of forensic language analysis
is faced with serious problems: 1) Very often, there are extremely
limited research conducted on the applicants’ speech communities
or languages, and 2) experts specializing in the given language(s)
are difficult to find. This has lead many governments to resort to
native-speakers with limited or no training and expertise in linguistics
to conduct such language analyses. Because these native-speakers often
lack the necessary academic linguistics training, their conclusions
are often scientifically unfounded. In this paper, I focus on the case
of some Pulaar asylum seekers who claim to be from Guinea Bissau, and
to have fled the country during the 1998-1999 civil war. First, I address
the major challenges facing language analysts in such cases. Second,
I discuss the key forensic (socio)linguistic evidence that needs to
be established in order to reach an objective conclusion on such cases. |