ABSTRACT
Since the mid-1990s, the speech of asylum seekers has been analyzed at the request of some governments as an aid to determining their country of origin, and/or "to deter false claims of origin". This chapter investigates the context, process and consequences of Language Analysis for Determination of Origin (LADO) from a sociolinguist's perspective, tracing the impact of field's involvement, through the journey: from a creolist conference in Honolulu in 2003. The global(ized) nature of asylum gives LADO broad geographic and cultural range. Some asylum advocates argue LADO is too immature for Refugee Status Determination, given the human stakes. Linguistic approaches to LADO include cross-cultural communication, dialectology, first- and second-language acquisition, language contact, language assessment, code-switching, linguistic variation and change, phonetics, and speaker profiling or identification. The task of LADO is often presented as a straightforward linguistic one in reports, and interpreted simply as common sense by decision-makers or immigration judges.
