How the Home Office Uses Language Science to Keep the Foreigners Out

Being an asylum seeker is very peak. You’ve most likely just done the maddest of journeys. You’re tired, disorientated and fearful that you’ll be sent back. Truth is though, every step in the asylum application, from the fact that you have to go and report to a local police station regularly while your application is being assessed, to the way the interview is done (it’s almost identical to a police interview), to the linguistics analysis you’re subjected to which is designed to catch you out using the wrong phrase/words, to the way the appeal process works. Everything is done to “catch you out”. To prove that you’re a lying bastard.

In short, the system is stacked against you.

You want to give yourself the best possible chance of being granted asylum. So, you try and tap into the local cultural capital that your peopledem have managed to accumulate in the short time they’ve been here. Our house for much of the early 2000s was a transit point. Relatives or just people that we knew through other people would come and stay with us. Knowledge about the system is amassed really quickly. And everyone in your circle becomes hyper aware of any changes in the Home’s Office’s policy towards asylum seekers. In 2001, the government introduced linguistics analysis for asylum seekers. The government took a political problem and said, hey, it’s now in the hands of science. IF science rejected people’s applications, it’s because those people were lying. Science doesn’t lie. But humans do. Asylum seekers even more so.

For the Home Office, the purpose of this linguistics test is to determine where exactly the asylum seeker is from. But you can’t use language to determine origin. That’s not actually a thing. And yet, in one statement made by a high Home Office official, the system works so well that between 2011 and 2013, 12 “Palestinian” asylum seekers were subjected to this language assessment. The Home Office concluded that “none of the 12 claiming to be Palestinian (100%) were found to be from Palestine”. I imagine at least one department head in the civil service got a round of applause that day. “We managed to catch out 12 lying bastards this year with our language analysis”. But suppose, suppose for a second that they were born in Yarmouk refugee camp outside of Damascus, or had spent a large chunk of their lives in Jordan, Lebanon, etc. Surely then they would “fail” the test. But they are Palestinian. They are still stateless. Both of those facts are still true regardless of how they pronounced their voiceless uvular stops. But I think the government knew that.

The government guidelines on linguistic analysis are quite literally peppered with the word “scientific” and “science”. Sometimes, these words aren’t even necessary to the sentence at hand. The entire point of the whole thing is to treat asylum seekers like they’re some shifty character doing their utmost to shaft society, and to invent, as John Campbell puts it, “social categories of deviance to rationalize the way the government processes asylum applications.” Science this, science that, but on closer inspection, you’ll find that the “expert linguistics analysis” the government describes in its guidelines is essentially a glorified interview with an interpreter. It lasts 20 minutes. There is very little transparency on what this linguistics analysis involved, what its methodology is, how it hopes to deliver the level of accuracy that it promises and at what point of the decision-making process does LA come to be considered.

They claim to only do it when they absolutely need to do it. But there’s some evidence to suggest that other forms of “linguistic analysis” are being used (i.e. interviewer asking interpreter if they think applicant was fibbing). But that’s not even the scary part of this whole LA debacle. For me, the most terrifying aspect of LA is that the results of the “analysis” is admissible in court. As in, a judge will look at those results and treat it the way they would treat any other forensic evidence.

That didn’t stop one Supreme Court judge though from questioning the assessment of one “linguistic expert”. Secretary of State for Home Department (Appellant) v MN and KY is a case in point. Someone said that they were from Somalia and that they belong to a minority group. The language expert who 1. Didn’t have any linguistics background 2. Had been to university but did nothing on Somali linguistics, sociology, etc and 3. Had not been back to Somalia since 1990 determined that this applicant was not from Somalia. They concluded that the applicant was from Kenya. So, the Home Office rejected the application. It then went to a tribunal, the tribunal rejected the application citing the language assessment report written by the “expert”. It took years for the case to make it to the Supreme Court. One of the big things that came out of that was that Sprakab, the company the home office contracted out to do this work, couldn’t be relied on for shit. The judge goes on to say that “there were serious questions about the basis on which the Sprakab analysts felt able to establish with such certainty the geographical allocation of the appellants’ modes of speech.” Home Office dropped Sprakab the same year.

What we’re essentially talking about is whether someone deserves to be protected under international law. So, how could we allow for such an important and momentous decision to be made by freelancing interpreters that often have no formal linguistics training. But I think that there’s a broader point to be made. And that is, this type of linguistics analysis, if it’s in fact a thing (which I’m not convinced that it is), shouldn’t it account for an array of different relationships and factors. Namely, people’s movements, familial complexities, dialect diversity in transit zones like Malta, Cairo, Nairobi, Tripoli, Istanbul and Athens. It’s one thing to say, “ok, judging from the way this person speaks, are they really from the place they say they’re from”. And it’s another to look for explanations for why the asylum applicant prefers a specific synonym or leans towards a phonemic segment over others given the region they claim to be from. Language can never be directly mapped onto a geographical location or a national identity.

The fundamental flaw with seeing language in such a way is that it fails to account for two things: 1. How quickly language changes and 2. Just how permeable speech communities are. It takes no time at all to adapt the way you speak. An asylum seeker by definition, is someone on the move. They’ve seen the world of shit, and have decided to keep it moving, sometimes across entire continents tapping into existing communities, trying to make connections, fit in, and that does a lot to one’s “mother dialect”. Whatever that is. Fam, I’m not even talking diglossia here. I mean, actual fundamental changes to the way you speak changes.

In the Somali context, the Home Office regularly shifted its policies in the 90s and 2000s, at times refusing to take in people from certain regions it deemed “safe”. For a hot minute, applications from the north were being refused. The north was deemed safe. So, if you wanted to maximise your chances of your asylum application being accepted, you wouldn’t say that you were from a northern tribe. It mattered little where you escaped from, where you had lived, where you were born. To get papers, just don’t say you had any links to the north at all. There was another shift in the mid-2000s, where being from a “major” tribe meant that you were less likely to be given papers, and again, this was implemented with very little local knowledge. Home Office had a pretty laughable view of “tribes”, who controlled what area, what they were likely to sound like, and would sometimes bring in “expert interviewers” who would ask about the asylum seekers’ lineage. Imagine 19th century anthropology but in the 21st and instead of Richard Burton, you’ve got Alan, a northern lad going off last week’s memos. You’re telling him about being **insert tribe here** and having seen a madness in **insert city name here** and all he wants to do is get home, put on the kettle, fix a brew and watch some Peter Kay.

So, you might sit there, and think, raa. Couldn’t the government do better with these tests? Truth is, yes. But they weren’t trying to do better. Better has never been the point. These donnys were never interested in an “objective” truth about language and the way these asylum seekers spoke at home. This is because the most basic of all assumptions made by the linguistics analysis programme is that asylum seekers are very much in the business of nation-swapping. Something that can get very dangerous very quickly, when you start to use linguistics analysis to try and determine people’s tribes/ethnicities/regions. Because you can’t. And people suffer.