On the use of ‘language analysis’ in asylum applications made by
West Africans in the Netherlands

Jacques Arends
University of Amsterdam

TIn deciding on applications for asylum, the Dutch Immigration Department bases itself, among other things, on so-called ‘language analyses’. Contrary to what one would expect, these ‘analyses’ are performed by lay persons – (native) speakers of the language(s) concerned - not by professional linguists. While this practice in itself is open to critique, it is all the more problematic in the case of asylum seekers originating from West Africa, especially those areas where language varieties are spoken that are related to English, such as Krio and Liberian English. In a number of cases, the language spoken by asylum seekers claiming to originate from Sierra Leone or Liberia (both of which are/were regarded as unsafe countries by the Immigration Department), has been determined by the ‘analyst’ as being ‘not Krio’ or ‘not Liberian English’, usually supplemented by the remark that what is spoken is probably Nigerian or Ghanaian Pidgin English. Since Nigerians and Ghanaians are not entitled to asylum in the Netherlands, these applications are subsequently denied. As a rule, the quality of the ‘analyses’ is outright abominable, usually adducing only a handful of language features allegedly supporting the linguistic identification by the ‘analyst’. While the similarities between Krio and Nigerian Pidgin English are well-known, the two languages are by no means identical. Since many of the differences are of a very subtle nature, it is of utmost importance that the analyses are performed by linguists who are specialized in the languages concerned.

The role of linguistic expertise in asylum applications: A case study of a Sierra Leonean asylum seeker in the Netherlands

Chris Corcoran
University of Chicago

PBecause of war in Sierra Leone during the 1990s, a number of European countries granted asylum status to Sierra Leonean refugees. The Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany in particular are places where linguistic expertise has been solicited in efforts to authenticate citizenship for refugees applying for asylum status without documentation. In a number of countries in Europe there has been a radical increase in the number of refugees seeking asylum in general and from African countries in particular. For example, in Belgium the number of asylum seekers was approximately 200 in 1981 but was as high as 24,000 per year in the 1990s (Blommaert 2003). The dramatic increase in case loads has meant a constantly evolving set of policies and relationship between government agencies and forensic linguistic work. Thus far only a handful of published articles has appeared on the topic: Blommaert 2001, 2003; Bobda et al 1999, Maryns 2000, Maryns and Blommaert 2002.

This paper examines one case in detail involving a Sierra Leonean claimant in the Netherlands who was denied asylum based on a series of four language reports resulting from two taped interviews conducted specifically for the purposes of language analysis. These reports were generated over a period of two years by Sierra Leoneans with a minimal amount of linguistic training working for the Dutch Immigration Department. I present a review of the arguments I made concluding in favor of the asylum seeker. I compare lists of tokens presented by the Dutch Immigration Department as evidence against the Sierra Leonean origins of the claimant and my own lists. I discuss my presentation of counter arguments and also my struggle to articulate the role variation in pronunciation plays and notions of accommodation within the contra-expertise genre being developed in the asylum-seeking-in-the-Netherlands context. I discuss the particular problems generated for this asylum seeker because of conflicting interests between the institutional framing adopted by the language analysts on the one hand-one that looks for encyclopedic lists of information in its quest to authenticate-and the conventions of cooperative conversation on the other.