Shifting the Burden: towards new tests for Language Analysis in the Asylum Procedure

The purpose of Language Analysis in the Asylum Procedure (LAAP) is to produce a linguistic assessment of claims to origin by asylum applicants who cannot or will not prove their identity by documentary means. It is used by a number of governments, particularly in Europe.
Considering the discordant state of the literature on LAAP, remarkably little directly relevant experimental work has so far been conducted. The core of this thesis is thus empirical in nature. The ultimate objective of the experiments is the development of novel, supplementary tests for LAAP. These experiments principally investigate the perceptions of native speaker non-linguists (NSNLs), a category to which the vast majority of asylum applicants belong. Perception is an aspect of applicants’ linguistic competence that has hitherto been overlooked in LAAP, which analyses only their language production.
At present, applicants must demonstrate the authenticity of their language production in a one-shot interview. Interview practices, and the assessment of the derived data by NSNL analysts, have provoked particularly sustained criticism. The best-developed of the proposed tests would both diverge from and complement current LAAP practice by eliciting judgements from applicants themselves, not an NSNL analyst, in identifying their own (claimed) language variety.
The experiments herein primarily concern Syrian Arabic. Results demonstrate, inter alia, significantly superior accuracy for Syrian over non-Syrian NSNLs in identifying Syrian speakers. This engenders optimism about the development of the projected new tests. These could be founded on the empirically validated performance of the target test groups—(Syrian) Arabic-speaking NSNLs vs. (non-Syrian) Arabic-speaking NSNLs—in the present thesis and/or related work yet to be conducted. Such tests, in confirming or casting doubt on the assessment of data emerging from the LAAP interview, would add at least one extra layer of validation to extant LAAP practice, thereby enhancing its fairness, rigour and transparency.