 Today, Chris Lucas. Most of you, of course, with no Chris, and you'd be familiar with his work and his research. So Chris is a senior lecturer in Arabic linguistics in the Department of Linguistics, shortly with the Department of Languages and Cultures of the Near Middle East. That's the name. Took me a while to memorize that. His main research interests are grammatical change, particularly the historical development of definiteness and negation, language contact, the interface between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Chris has done some work on many different languages, a few dialects of Arabic, of course, and a lot of his work has focused on Maltese in the past few years. He's also done some work on Afro-Azintic languages. His work on Berber, for instance. A little bit, yeah. But still, on Coptic, and on English at some point. That's a while going on. Also now, yeah. German as well? Not really, but I like German. Well, only English. And he's also working on dynamic syntax. On and off. Which is a framework we've logged here that's so awesome. Just good to mention it. Right, anyway, today he's going to talk about determining the origin of azidic elements through language analysis, the case of Arabic. OK, well, thank you very much indeed, Aisha, for that very kind introduction. So, yes, this topic I'm going to be talking to you about is a very new topic for me that my research has not until now been on any kind of applied issues like this. But this topic is something which I've been engaged with myself in a kind of non-research context for a few years. And so I thought it was time to start thinking about it more seriously. OK, so I'll just tell you first of all what I'd like to cover today. And by the way, if at any point anyone wants anything's unclear, please feel free to stop me. I'm happy to take brief questions during the talk. OK, so first of all, I'm going to tell you about this thing Lardo, language analysis for the determination of origin and what it is in general. And then I'm going to give you a bit of the context in which people who work on Arabic might encounter Lardo in the UK. I'm going to tell you about my own experience of Lardo and the methodology that I have adopted when performing it until now. And then I want to raise some practical and ethical problems that you encounter if you do this. And finally make a couple of suggestions of next steps. So what is Lardo? What it is basically is a tool that some governments, by no means all, but a fair few, use to help them decide asylum cases. And the underlying assumption is that if a person comes to a particular government claiming asylum, you can analyze their speech and then potentially falsify their nationality claim. The idea is that if they're making a fraudulent claim, you can tell that it's fraudulent if their speech has certain features. Now, this is not a kind of very old practice. It's probably not more than about 20 years old. And linguists have in general tended to be rather critical of the whole enterprise. Both the principle of the thing and especially how it seems to have been carried out, generally speaking, in practice. So I think it's fair to say that a number of linguists have serious doubts whether Lardo should be performed at all, whether it's fit for purpose, whether it's underlying assumptions actually make sense in the real world. I don't, odd as it may sound, I don't myself have a very strong position on this. I can certainly, a lot of the objections to Lardo which we'll see in the course of this afternoon are very well founded. But I do, my own experience suggests to me that while I think there's probably a large gray area of cases where Lardo can't really help us much, at the extremes, I think in certain contexts, and Arabic may well be one of them, but you can, I think, say some fairly definite things about whether a person is, for example, from Syria or not. But we'll see all of this in some examples that I'll show you. So there is a lot of Lardo going on right now with Arabic speakers. But there's been, these three references, and this one is written in Dutch, are basically the only stuff, only publications that they've been to date on Lardo in the Arabic setting. So it's very, it's urgent from an academic point of view and from a political, ethical point of view that we understand this process better. OK, so how does Lardo work in the UK? The first thing to say is that it's not applied in anything like all UK asylum cases. So in 2009, which was the last year I was able to find very clear figures for, it was applied in only approximately 5% of cases. So the idea really is that it's not allowed. The law doesn't allow for it to be applied routinely. There has to be some source of doubt as to the veracity of a claim. And then the people investigating the claim can get some Lardo done. Now, it's not routinely permitted. However, it is routinely permitted for applicants or people who say they're from Kuwait, Palestine and Syria because those countries are supposedly associated with a particularly high level of fraudulent claims, supposedly. To put it another way, if you are going to lie about where you're from, these are popular places to lie about where you're from, supposedly. Now, last year, 2,539 people claimed asylum and said they were from Syria. So I don't have any figures on what percentage of that number were subjected to a Lardo test. But I think it must be a low percentage. So this is a table of the top 10 countries by number of applicants of asylum claims in the UK in 2015. So there were most asylum claims from people who said they were from Eritrea and so on. Now, here, this is the percentage of claims which were granted at the initial stage, which were accepted at the initial stage. Now, if you claim asylum in the UK and your initial claim is rejected, then in virtually all cases, you have the right to an appeal. And so this is the number of appeals that happened. I got this from, I think, amnesty. I don't really know why we've got percentages here and numbers here, but anyway. And this tells you what percentage of appeals were successful. And the discrepancies here are very interesting, and I don't really know how to explain them. So only half of people who said they were from Eritrea had their claims accepted in the first instance, but then presumably almost all of those then appealed and almost all of the appeals were granted. On the other hand, if you look at Syria, it's kind of the reverse. Most of them were accepted in the first instance, but then of those who appealed, most of them had their appeals turned down. So these discrepancies are interesting and strange to me, and I don't exactly know how to explain them. But basically, given the amount of inquiries I received about appeals, for me to act as an expert in appeals in 2015, number one, because there weren't so many inquiries, I think there wasn't much lardo done in the first instance. And number two, the lardo reports that I have seen make me think that they very often find that the person is making a fraudulent claim. So this very high figure suggests to me that there wasn't all that much lardo done on claimants from Syria, or who said they were from Syria. But there were some, and we'll look at that in a bit. OK, so that may have been slightly confusing, and hopefully this will now make it clearer. How it works is this. If the government wants to do a lardo test before deciding whether to give someone asylum or not, what they do is they contract a specialized company to do the test for them. And since 2014, that company has been a Swedish company called Verified AB. Before 2014, it was another Swedish company called, pronounce it for me? Språkab. AB means something like limited, yeah. Now, interestingly, the reason for the switch was that Språkab came under serious, in for serious criticism from a number of sources culminating in there was a case that went to the Supreme Court, and the judge in that case harshly criticized the way Språkab had been conducting lardo. And he based himself, the judge, on arguments that have been made by linguists, which goes to show that we really can make a genuine difference at a very high level. So they were kind of quietly ushered out, and Verified is now the main supplier. So that's what happens in the first instance. So in the first instance, in the UK, there's no involvement of freelance academic experts like me. In other countries, for example, Switzerland, there is. So what happens here is if they want to do lardo, they ask Verified to do it for them. And then if the initial claim, a silent claim, is rejected, and if it is rejected and lardo has been carried out, the lardo report will be a big factor in the rejection. So if that happens, then there's an appeal. And then legal practitioners who are representing the asylum claimant will recruit experts to produce independent, new, fresh lardo reports that could be used as evidence in the appeal. Does that make sense? So my own experience, since about late 2013, I've received about 20 inquiries from solicitors. Usually they look like this. So I'm writing from such and such as solicitors, based wherever, specializing in immigration asylum. I found your contact details on the SOAS website as someone who is an Arabic language expert and wondered if you do independent language analysis reports. So I underlined this because this, of course, they're all worded differently. But I get the sense from these emails that the way they find experts to do these reports is very haphazard and ad hoc. Maybe kind of based on word of mouth or just googling. And my job title is Senior Lecturer in Arabic Linguistics. And probably if you put Arabic dialects and things, I'll come up. So I think that's why they come to me. They don't know whether I do this or not. And the first few I got, I felt I didn't have time and it was a distraction. And so I said no. But they still kept coming from different solicitors. So that to me is, I don't blame them at all. It's probably it's more our fault, the linguists and arabists, that we haven't got organized yet and created a kind of register of linguists who are active in Lardo. But we have not done that to date. So I guess they just have to kind of do it in this ad hoc way. So this is also absolutely typical of the inquiries I've received. We're currently representing a Syrian young person. I mean, they're not always but very often young, born and raised in Homs. His initial assignment claim has been refused on the basis that the Home Office do not think he is Syrian and that he is Egyptian. And that pairing is by far the most common that I see. Someone says they're from Syria and Verified says they're lying, they're from Egypt. So that's how the whole process starts from my point of view. I get an email like that and that's what I just said. And I don't have time to do most of them, in fact, but I do do some of them. And one of the ways I decide or have decided until now about whether I should do a particular case or not is whether I think there's a chance of winning the appeal. And I'm not sure if that's ethical. And I'd really appreciate your thoughts on that. But that's one kind of method I've used. So I ask them, can I see the initial report? And if the initial report, and preferably also the recording it's based on, and if I agree with the initial report, if it sounds accurate to me that the person is not from where they say they're from, then I feel little incentive to spend a lot of my time trying to somehow undermine that report. So it does seem to be the case that there are fraudulent claims. So for example, here was one report I saw. So this was an older one. So it was done by Sprokab. And the claimant said they were from Kuwait. And I want to tell you, highlight two things in this report. Number one, I want to show you evidence that to me is very good evidence that the person is indeed from Egypt and not Kuwait. And number two, despite that or kind of over and above that, I want to show you how there are some very, very serious problems, nevertheless, with this report. So number one, the transcription is horrible. But it's clear that what they're saying here, this claimant for next to us has said Gambina, which is, if you know Arabic, is just classic Egyptian. Kuwaiti should be Yemna, or maybe Jandna, OK? They said to me, translation is horrible, transcription is horrible, this means they said to me, Alulih, this is classic Egyptian. And Kuwaiti should be, I'm not really an expert on these Gulf dialects, but should be something along the lines of Galoli, OK? I have not studied Madarastish, this actually happens to be a good transcription. And Kuwaiti should be Madarast. So assuming that there's nothing fictitious in this report, and I guess we have to assume that, then there's strong evidence that this person is not from Kuwait and is in fact from Egypt, OK? But I also want to impress upon you that this report, which is supposedly drafted by reliable experts, just has some kind of embarrassing nonsense in it, OK? So what do they actually mean? They mean, gert, where you'd expect jj, or perhaps yj, OK? This is awful, OK? What they mean is, glottal stop instead of a voiceless, UV-less stop, so instead of q, OK? In Egyptian Arabic and standard Arabic, there's a consonant, a glottal stop, which is completely and utterly distinct from the vowel a, OK? So there's no excuse whatsoever for, I mean, this would, I wouldn't accept this in my students, second year students who are just starting to think about these things. So that's not very good. Sometimes you're just really looking at the awful transcription and the meaning they give. You just can't tell what it's supposed to be. I don't know if this is meant to be, ah, right? But does that mean lived? It doesn't matter whether you know Arabic or not. Just take it from me. This is very confusing and strange. And here, maybe, I don't know, I want to be careful what I say here. But basically, what does this say? This says, Makenish, Makenish. As far as I'm aware, you would never hear an Egyptian saying Makenish. You would hear Makenish. Now maybe this is just a copy-paste error, because this is correct, meddestish. Maybe they just copied the end of this and put it here. Because this vowel here is what's called an epithetic vowel. It comes because otherwise you have three consonants in a row, sa, ta, sh, which is not possible. But here, you only have two consonants in a row, so there's no a-penthesis. So maybe it's a copy-paste error. Maybe it's just what weird carelessness. But the thought crosses my mind that it's someone inventing Egyptian Arabic badly. I don't know which of those is correct. I think probably not the last, but I don't know. So that's sprachup. And it's no surprise that they were highly criticized. And I only know about the Arabic side. I mean, I only have direct experience of the Arabic side. But I think most of the criticism in that Supreme Court case that I mentioned came. It was focused on how they did Somali claims. So apparently it's just as bad there. OK. So the point is, right, there were all kinds of problems with that report. But if we take it at face value, it seems like this was someone who was lying and who was from Egypt and said they were from Kuwait. But there's no doubt that there is lardo that is done by not only sprachup but also verified that, even if superficially, it seems better than what I just showed you, still comes to conclusions about someone's provenance, which do not seem to me to be justified. So I'll give you an example. This was from a case which I did take on. So the person said they were from the Northwest Syrian countryside, like a village 30, 40 kilometers from Aleppo, and verified did lardo on them and said, in this case, they didn't actually say they're from Egypt or anywhere. They just said the evidence suggests this person is not from Syria. And what was the evidence they pointed to? Virtually nothing. This was one piece of evidence. So it's about the form of the suffix pronoun for third person feminine singular object and possessive. So basically, her, the word for her. So there's a lot about the way this report is laid out, which is vastly superior to what I just showed you from sprachup. So they kind of basically know what they're talking about, and they are using appropriate academic resources. So they say the suffix pronoun for third feminine singular has different realizations in different modern dialects. True. In most subvarieties of northern Syrian dialect group A, including group A4, that's taken directly from this work, this kind of division, is used. While in Huran dialects, southern Syria, is used. And they've got this from this work, Binstit, which is Sprach Atlas von Zürrin, a dialect atlas of Syria. And it's got many, many different maps. I'll show you one in a second, mapping the realization of different linguistic features. And so one of them is on this suffix. Then in Damascus, the suffix is this. What they mean by this is it varies. Sometimes it's her, sometimes it's ah. Now we get to a less good part of the report. According to analysts, the her is usually dropped in colloquial speech and leaves the endings ah. So the way these reports are done is as follows. There's a linguist who is in charge of writing the report. And the linguist is someone with a BA, not necessarily in linguistics, certainly not necessarily in Arabic. I've never seen one where the linguist speaks Arabic. But they're called a linguist. And they're someone who has some kind of academic training. But it doesn't have to be a degree in linguistics. And then the linguist works with two native speakers of Arabic. And they're called the analysts. And in this particular case, there was one of the. So you see in the report, the analysts are not named. They're anonymous. But it gives you some details about them. And in this report, there was one from Syria and one from Palestine. OK. So the point is the person uses her, which deviates from the expectations if they're from Northwest Syria. And so there's a couple of examples. Now, in the old days, it would just be, according to the analyst, what they reckon. This is not someone who speaks the language, not necessarily the dialect of the place where the person is from, but some dialect of the language. At least now, they're actually using good academic resources. Not that these resources are infallible by any means at all, but it's still better than someone's vague, uninformed guess. So you probably can't really see this, but just to give you the general impression, this is Beynsted's map of this feature. And the white areas are indeed what Beynsted says don't have ah and not ha, OK? And this person is from a white area. So according to Beynsted, well, according to this, according to a literal and superficial interpretation of this map, the person has not said what they're expected to say if they're from where they say they're from. However, first of all, this stuff about what happens in Horan and Damascus is kind of irrelevant, except what's done in Damascus is not so irrelevant, because as is often the way, the dialect of the capital has been better studied than other dialects. And what we find is that in Damascus, there's a large amount of variability. Now, Beynsted doesn't report any variability other than in Damascus, but this is just one map of about 200. He cannot go into fine details, and I can't speak for him, but I highly doubt he would say no. What I'm absolutely saying, I can go on the record as saying, people from here never, ever say ha. They only ever say ah. I highly, highly doubt he's saying that. We should expect variability of this kind, OK? That individuals sometimes do one thing, sometimes do the other thing. And especially because one thing that these reports never take into account, which is really unforgivable in my view, is the reports that I have seen. They never take into account accommodation. Now, accommodation, what I mean by that is the phenomenon, the absolutely ubiquitous phenomenon, whereby when you speak to someone with a different idelect or a different dialect to you, you will tend to approach them somewhat in the way you speak. And that tendency is particularly strong in cases where there's a kind of power disparity between two people. And you're not going to find a much more blatant case of a power disparity between someone seeking asylum and someone with the power in their hands to say they're speaking the truth or they're not. So you hear this. When you hear the recordings of these interviews, the interviewer has a dialect of someone who's well educated from a city in usually, it sounds like they're from Beirut, maybe northern Syria, the ones I've heard. And these claimants, usually in the ones I've seen, say they're from different parts of the Syrian countryside. It's completely, I mean, it would be actually unexpected that the claimant manages to speak exactly as they would speak to, say, friends or family or young children from their home village. That is a very, very unrealistic expectation. Even though they're told to speak like that, even if they understand the instruction, following the instruction is not going to be an easy matter. So I think it's very important to take accommodation into account. OK, the point is this is one piece of evidence they offer that the person is lying. And in my view, it's a rather flimsy piece of evidence. In this particular report, the only other piece of evidence they had was not this time based on any academic sources. Just according to the analyst, the person said a couple of things which supposedly someone from where they say they're from shouldn't have said. But so the analyst is a native speaker of Syrian or Palestinian with no qualifications in linguistics or dialectology, as I already said. The question is, can this analyst really be certain that these items, bardo and shawarlo, don't occur in this claim in style? Can they really be sure of that? And again, even if we suppose they can be sure, which seems unrealistic to me, if we're going to expect the claimant to be accommodating to the speech of the interviewer. And by the way, when you accommodate, you don't necessarily do it successfully. Maybe the interviewer also doesn't say bardo. But maybe the claimant thinks, oh, well, I don't say bardo, but I probably should say bardo if I want to sound however I should be sounding. And the other thing is dialect contact. So very often we're talking about, say, a 17-year-old who lived in the Northwest Syrian countryside until they were perhaps 14. And then for the past three years of their 17 years, they've been mixing with all kinds of different people in different countries, different Arabic speakers. They might have been hanging out with an Egyptian or whoever most of the time for a number of years now. And that's going to have an impact on their speech. And we've got to take that into account somehow. All right. And then the point is, the way these reports are always structured, they look at phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon, which is good. They're examining all areas. But what I have seen is there's a tendency to cherry pick evidence that points against the veracity of the claim. So I've given you the two bits of evidence they thought they could find against the veracity of the claim. But then the rest of the report looks like this. And that seems to not be taken into account. So despite all of that, because there's supposedly some evidence against, then the overall conclusion is they're not where they say they're from. OK. So I've received about 20 inquiries. I've actually done four reports. One of them was a bit different. I just had to do a kind of discussion of whether it's possible that different Arabic dialects might be mutually unintelligible. But the other three were all like responding to reports like the one you've just seen. So there were responses to verified reports which doubted acclaimed Syrian origin. And in constructing my own report, I employed the same methodology for all three. And like I say, these emails just came out of the blue. There's no kind of association of Arabists who do lardo. So I just had to make something up. And I'm going to show you what I made up. And if you have criticisms of it, that would be great because I want to improve it. So first of all, I'm not saying that if you are starting from scratch, this is how you should test someone's dialect. I'm saying this seems to me to work in the context of how asylum appeals, how the whole asylum system works in the UK. So this is what I do. First of all, if I decide to take it on, it's because the initial report looks bad to me. So the first thing I do is collect a representative sample of poor analyses in the original report. And by the way, I always listen to the recording that the report is based on. Then I interview the claimant over Skype. And what I do is I don't redo the whole test. I just test their lexicon. And I do that with reference to this wonderful publication, the Void Atlas of the Arabian dialect. So it's a word atlas of Arabic dialects. And I'll show you a few maps from there. Again, of course, this is not infallible by any means. But it gives us a good basis that is superior to one person's anecdotal impressions. And then I write a report based on the above. So did you hear about the most popular page on the New York Times website in 2013? It was this. It was a dialect quiz. And it had, by a long way, the most visits of any page on the New York Times website in 2013, even though it only went up on December the 21st. So anyone in this audience, did you grow up in the US? Would you like to do this quiz quickly with me? OK, great. How would you address a group of two or more people? You? OK. What would you call a sale of unwanted items on your porch or in your yard, et cetera? Sorry? Stoop sale. OK. What do you call the area of grass in the middle of some streets? What do you call a drive-through liquor store? This is fine if this is the answer. OK. What do you call an easy high school or college class? What do you call the large wildcat native to the Americas? What do you call the small road parallel to the highway? What do you call the night before Halloween? What do you call the rubber-soled shoes worn in gym class or for athletic activities? How do you pronounce that? With one syllable rhymes with man, right? Yes, I mean, it's better if I don't read this. So that's this. That's this. OK, thank you. What do you call a traffic situation in which several roads meet in a circle? OK, great. Thank you. What do you call a small freshwater lobster often found in lakes and streams? How do you pronounce that? Two syllables. Yeah, that sounded, yeah. Oh, sorry. With this? What do you call the area of grass between the sidewalk and the road? What do you call something that is across both streets from you at an intersection or diagonally across from you in general? Well, you call something that the same. Same. Do it again for me? Sounds the same to me. What do you call the insect that flies around in the summer and glows in the dark? What do you call the long sandwich that contains cold cuts, lettuce, and so on? Hero. What do you call a large motor vehicle used to carry freight? What do you call a traffic jam caused by drivers slowing down to look at an accident or other diversion on the side of the road? Rubber-necking? That sounded all three the same to me. Yeah. It's like jam and not part. What do you call the small gray bug that curls up into a ball when it's touched? What do you call it when rain falls while the sun is shining? OK, excellent. Thank you very much. OK, great. Thank you very much. So why, so you grew up in New York? OK, it was drawn from work by the ex-Harvard and now Cambridge linguist Bert Vox and his students, someone gold their report, their dialect survey. Why was it so incredibly popular? Because it can do what just happened. It can pretty much accurately place people based on mostly their lexicon. So it works in that positive sense. Now, I would ask you to consider something. Do you think you could, if you're not from New York, do you think you could have faked that test and made it think you were from New York? I don't think I could. So my claim is that we can use the Vod Atlas in a similar way for Arabic glado. So what items you choose to test is going to vary depending on the claimed location of origin and the counterclaim by verified. But for example, here's a typical scenario. Applicant claims they're from Dar'a in Syria and verified says they're from Egypt. What can you test? Well, here's an example. I'm talking to these guys over Skype and I can share my screen with them and say, ask them, what do you call this guy? Now, why is that a good meaning to test? Because here's the map for Butcher from the Vod Atlas. These places have something along the lines of Jazar. Whereas in Syria, you have Laham. Not only Syria, but in the red area, you have Laham. Or something like Ghassab, Ghassab. So if they reply Laham or Ghassab, then that is consistent with Assyrian origin. Well, it's possible, but I returned to my question before. Do you know what they call a roundabout in New York? Now, I'm careful to say this is consistent with Assyrian origin. And if they say something like Ghazar, then that's consistent with a non-Syrian origin. If this was the only data point, we'd have nothing. But if you test 10 to 15 meanings like this and if you test 10 to 15 meanings like this and they get about six right, well, you can't say much. But the three times I've done it, what has happened is there's never been more than like one or two that are the expected Egyptian one. They've always been about two or three where they just kind of give you no good answer. And the rest have been consistent with Assyrian origin. So another example, Tyre. You see pink over there, blue over there. If they say something like Doulab, consistent with Syrian. If they say something like Cowich or Aghala, it's consistent with non-Syrian. OK, so I want to remind you that it's not necessary in this particular context to be able to say with certainty or near certainty even that this person is from Syria. That's not necessary. The question is this. Was verified justified in stating that the claimant is more likely to be Egyptian than to be from Daraa? That's the only question in this particular context that we have to answer. And if I feel that the answer is no, then what I do is I critique verified's analysis. I supplement that critique with my own lexical analysis on the basis along the lines of what I just told you. And it seems to work. So I'm drawing to a close here. Here are some practical and ethical problems, issues that have arisen for me. And I don't really know what the answers are, but I'd be very interested in your thoughts if you have any on any of these. First of all, like I said before, if you have any criticisms of the methodology I just showed you, please let me know. A big problem that I don't know how to answer is this. I can't accept all of these cases. Although, funnily enough, the inquiries seem to have dried up in the last few months. I don't know why. I can't accept them all. So which ones do I accept and which ones do I turn down? The problem I face here is I feel like there's two competing ethical standards. On the one hand, I feel some pressure to use my academic knowledge in a impartial way, in a dispassionate way. And so I feel some kind of pressure to choose them randomly, perhaps, and not just choose ones where I think there's a big chance of success. On the other hand, I have my own personal political opinions. And personally, I prefer the idea of some people coming into the country based on a fraudulent claim to the idea of genuine claimants being turned down wrongly. But should I let that be a consideration? I don't know. How much should I charge? And why should I charge that much? From speaking to some of these people, I've got the impression, and it's perhaps not surprising, that these are quite traumatized people. And I don't really have training in. Yeah? That's a good question. And then by doing this, you might potentially be contributing to them being turned down and going back to somewhere else where they're not safe. Let me just finish in two minutes and come back to that. The other thing is you're acting in a professional capacity. And so you feel a kind of pressure to adhere to the standards that are required in academia. But at the same time, you're dealing with non-linguists. You've got to present arguments that are comprehensible and persuasive to non-linguists. And that's not necessarily an easy balance to strike. So my view is that you can't give these questions objectively correct answers. And the answers shouldn't be decided by individuals. And what I think should happen is that an association should be founded that minimally consists of Lardo-active Arabic linguists. And then together, we should decide the best way forward. And ideally, there should be a kind of larger association, including all the relevant stakeholders, like people from Verified. Because let's put it this way. I think we have to be realistic. This is a profit-making company that I have no doubt is staffed by honorable people trying to do a good job. So they're honorable people trying to do a good job. But their money depends on their contract from the UK government being renewed. And we know the answer to the question of whether the UK government would like immigration to go up or down. So they know that as well. So I think that just suggests to me that it's very important to work together with everyone involved in this enterprise and try and collectively come to an agreement on the best way forward, basically. And that is everything I want to say. Thank you. For a very interesting talk, is there a question? Can I just respond to the question we had before first? So do you mind just repeating it for me, Jit? Sometimes people claim asylum from one country when they're actually from another one because of safety reasons or other political reasons. And sometimes they're more likely to be accepted or refused based on that. And perhaps by doing this, you might contribute to a system which sends people back to places where they're not safe. Right. Right. So I wonder how you're going to respond. I've got you. Yeah, thank you very much. That's a really good point. I'm glad I was to repeat because I didn't get it the first time, but now I see what you're saying. Yeah, well, I mean, that is a kind of argument against the entire enterprise, against the validity of the entire enterprise. And like I said at the beginning, I am sympathetic to those kinds of arguments. I think we have to accept that that's a kind of like, that's a kind of well-motivated. I hesitate to condemn any type of fraudulent claim, but you might say that that type of fraudulent claim is more noble than another type, perhaps. And given that there are fraudulent claims, and if we accept what is, after all, the majority view that there should be curbs on immigration, if we accept that, then governments have to have some means of deciding which are the true claims and which are the false claims. Do I think in an ideal world that using Lado should be one of the tools in that box? I don't know. I mean, in an ideal world, possibly not, or possibly only in a very restricted way and only if it's done extremely, extremely well. But the fact is, it is here to stay. And I'm a bit on the fence, so I'm not going to be out campaigning against Lado in general. But if that is what a lot of people feel, and some do, then linguists should be campaigning against it. And it could well have an effect. But the situation we're in right now is that it is used. And I have seen these reports that are causing asylum claims to be rejected on what strikes me, in my professional opinion, as unfair grounds. And so I feel like I'm helping if I do it. But I agree, it's fraught with difficult issues. The point is more on political side and the question is more on linguistics. The political point of point is rather neatly from what you were just saying. I think it was a name of us as academics to think that the government's motivation is open, objective, and I'd just like to draw a small parallel with the position of EU citizens who are in this country now and who are playing with the residency. They have to fill in an 85-page form and pay 1,200 pounds in order to apply for family residency, however long they've been here for. A friend of mine who's been here 40 years, who's French, went through this. She was then asked where she was exactly three years to the day before she filled in the form. She honestly looked at her diary and said she'd been announced to them on business to the day and said, oh, that's it, you're right. So the point is that they want any excuse. This is not because I hate everybody in the government. But they are actually looking for any small reason to reject applications, because as you say, the objective is not to increase immigration, it's to reduce it. So one shouldn't be in any sort of doubt about that. The linguistic question is I was very interested that you think that a lexical test is a, I'm sure you don't think it's the only way to do it, but that it's a reliable way to do it. Because I would have guessed if you'd asked me that phonology would be much more difficult to fake and much less subject, despite the validation, to the vagaries of moving to a big city and changing in some way, et cetera. We all know it's much more subconscious and enduring for your pronunciation. So I wonder why you are so reliant on this. Yes, thank you, that's a great question. And actually, in the early days of Lardo, the kind of non-academic organizations that were doing it did rely largely on lexical, on testing lexicon. And that was harshly criticized, rightly so, by these kind of early reports, early academic reactions to the situation. So this is like a big and complicated issue that needs to be studied better. But I'll give you my take on it. Number one, I repeat my disclaimer that this is like in the context of me reacting to a report which has already looked at all levels, all linguistic levels. And so in a way, I am also, I am also retesting those other levels, just not on the basis of a fresh bit of data. I'm just reanalyzing the initial data. Then on top, I'm collecting new data, but only on the lexicon. I now, I agree with you that it's easier to change the word you usually use for something than it is for your accent to change. I agree with you 100% there. And we can talk about the reasons why that is. But there's a kind of deeper principle which is this. I mean, this is an oversimplification of the true situation, but we can put it like this. The more frequently you're exposed to something, some bit of linguistic stuff, the more liable you are to shift to that. And why does that, now in America, the genesis of that test on the New York Times, the genesis of that research was this observation by Bert Vox that you get, so superficially, the observation runs counter to what you're saying. So you get the situation whereby Americans from all over the US have different accents, but then they travel to a different part of the US for college and within some short amount of time to a casual ear, everyone in the college has roughly the same kind of general American accent. So then the question is, does anything still distinguish their dialects? And the answer is, yes, lexicon of a certain kind does. Now, of what kind? Basically, not lexicon that you encounter frequently on a daily basis. No, that is the absolute first thing that you change. But when you're doing your kind of, attending your maths lectures and hanging out with your friends, how often do you talk about the strip of grass between the pavement and the road? Maybe a couple of times in three years. And so, although it's lexicon, which in itself is very, what's the word, fluid, if you choose it well, then people cannot change how they speak because they haven't had sufficient exposure to the new way of speaking, you see what I mean? So that's, that is my basic answer to that. And I think, well, yeah, yeah, but it must, it needs to be looked into in a much more serious way for sure. Yeah. If lexical tests have been shown to be effective, especially in an online and automatic capacity, do you see any possibility that that could be replicated and not needing expensive experts so maybe an online test that could be administered with little cost and higher effectiveness? Yeah, I mean, it's a very interesting question and people of, like friends have suggested that before. Like maybe you could make your fortune, like especially in Germany, where they're processing thousands and thousands of claims. I mean, maybe, but I'd be very, very wary of it. I mean, I think there's like so many ways in which it could all go wrong. First of all, from the kind of government's point of view in terms of like trying to make things as effective as possible. If you've got, I mean, this is also an issue for my way of testing as I'm currently doing it, but I think it becomes much more of an issue in the kind of context you're talking about. I think word will get out what the test is like and what you need to do to pass the test. So I think from the government's point of view, I think that would be a serious problem. From the other side, I don't know, automating something like this, it just rings alarm bells in terms of computer says no, you know? I don't know, I mean, let's put it this way. I'm sure people in government, especially in Germany, they're thinking about it very seriously and if they think there's a way of making it happen, they probably will. But whether it would be a good thing, I'm not at all sure. Yeah. Did you want to? Well, I suppose if that's done in conjunction with other tests, then perhaps it could be more violent. I suppose that in response to word getting out, I mean, I'm sure word has got out that Lardo has used. Yeah. And of course, people would predict first of all that it would be a lexical test. So I suppose in some sense, perhaps that may have already happened. Sure, sure. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you so much. It was really interesting. Thank you. I'm used to hearing from you about that. That was fantastic. Thank you. I've got a couple of questions in regards to your last bit of questions that you asked. Yes. So in terms of, first of all, money, the money question. Yeah. How much have you charged if you don't mind saying now because you're asking us how much you think a good fee should be. So how much have you charged in the past and was it the same amount for all three or four that you've done or different? And in terms of creating an association of Lardo experts, have you been in contact with any of the Arabists that you know? Have they had the same queries coming to them? Yeah. Have you had any communication with anyone else in the community that you know? And what do they feel about that? Yeah. What are the general consensus? Yeah, on the second point, I presented this at an Arabic linguistics conference in December. And yeah, everyone gets inquiries. And my impression is that most people just turn them down. Which surprised me, but that seems to be the case. In terms of consensus, we can talk later, but there's no consensus. Not yet. Now, yeah, I guess I was asking for this, wasn't I? Here's what I did. The first time I decided to do it, I can't remember who I asked exactly, but I asked someone at SOAS, someone in the kind of enterprise office, what should I charge? And they said a normal rate is 100 pounds an hour. So I charged 100 pounds an hour the first time because they asked you for your rates. I said 100 pounds an hour. And they didn't blink. So after that, I changed it to 150. And I've been doing 150. And the thing is, now, I need to understand these issues better. But the point is, at least there has been, I think it's changing, but I don't know. I just don't understand these things. And this is why we need some kind of association where this kind of figuring this stuff out can be distributed. But there's legal aid. But I think there's some kind of cap on it. I think there's something like 750 pounds. So what I've done is the whole thing takes me more than five hours. But I say, I charge 150, and it takes me five hours. So it ends up being 750. But maybe I should charge nothing, or maybe it's fine, or maybe I don't know. But I don't think there's any kind of objective answer. There just has to be interested parties have to kind of come to an agreement. Yeah, I think why you should be doing your expert work, for which you've prepared for a very long time in whole Korea, why should you be doing it for Korea? I mean, sadly, the solicitors are not doing their work. I mean, some of them are, but that's a different story altogether. And you're not a solicitor, and it's not for the representative. It's price or whatever. In terms of association, I'm very surprised to hear that there was no consensus amongst our assists. And do you want to start one then? Yes, the idea. I applied for a grant to do all of this. Let's see if I get it. I'm not very hopeful, but yeah. Did you try to sell a sympat front? No, no, but that's a good idea. I think it may have finished, but you can do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I feel like if I get the grant, and I don't have to teach, then this whole huge job is something worth fronting. If it's on the side, I don't know. I feel slightly like, why me, you know? Yeah. You're engaging with that, and he said, well, better leave it to someone else. Right, right, yeah, yeah. Yeah? Yeah, I'm just back to the Arabic context. Yes. When we speak about the Necrolos in Arabic, and I'm here just speaking in an IAF sense. OK. I'm from North Saudi Arabia. Yes, yes. And I'm wondering, how would you consider the, what I would call it, the self-dialects of the state when we speak about the tribes? Right, right. Especially like, I find myself struggling to judge whether this person is from Syria, from Iraq, or from Saudi, North Saudi Arabia, is Shemri, which is the tribe I came from. Yes. So how would you consider that? Yes. Well, yeah. Is it possible to use the Mexico, especially the Mexico and the phonological test to judge a bullet? Yes. Because in my sense, I can't, I can't decide. Yeah, yeah. Well, thank you very much. I mean, this is a really important question. The first very important point, which is a kind of huge problem with Lardo in general, is actually the only thing, well, not the only thing, but a very major thing that governments care about is nationality, like, you know, your citizenship. But as you're saying, language, dialect, and nationality are a very imperfect match, right? Very imperfect match. So this is really a big, big problem. What I try to do is, you know, I need to know exactly where these people are from. And not just, also, that in itself, where you're from. That's far too imprecise. You kind of need to know their history. So it's, you know, it's very difficult. And one should proceed with extreme caution, basically. But fortunately, what we don't have to do, it's not that someone presents themselves and speaks Arabic for 20 minutes, and then we have to figure out where they're from. No, it's a much more kind of specific question in this particular context that we have to decide on. We have to, yeah, here. What I'm having to do is make a judgment on whether the verified was justified in saying, this person is more likely from place A than from place B. So that makes it a lot easier. I don't have to say, the evidence tells me this person is from northern Saudi Arabia. All I have to say is, yes, it does seem justified that they were to say the person is more likely from Egypt. Remember the first thing I showed you, it did seem justified to say the person was more likely from Egypt than Kuwait, when they say Gambina and Al-Uli. It did seem justified. On the other hand, the person from Daraa, it did not seem justified to me, in my professional opinion, that to say that that person was more likely Egyptian than from Daraa. So it's kind of easier what I have to do than out of nothing making a kind of prediction about where they're from. Does that make sense? I'm just wondering if I can do the test. Yeah. How it goes? I'm not expecting to be judged as solid. Let's try it one time. Send me an email, and we'll try it. That'd be really interesting, yeah. Yeah. OK, OK. Hannah? I think it's you, Hannah. Yeah, thank you so much for being out of certain encourage and organization for some such as linguists is doing this. Yeah. And I, I'm working not on Arabic, particularly, support that being done a lot with a focus on Arabic. Yeah. And a better kind of organization. I was interested in your answer, yeah, thoughts, but maybe also advice. So you have this fantastic word atlas. Yeah. And what you do in the absence of that. So, like, I work in East Africa. Yeah. And we have, like, a word atlas from, like, the end of 1800s. So that's what, brother. And also, particularly, like, in the case of Suri, I mean, these events are very, very much current, right? So people are moving now, even something that's a word atlas from, presumably, 10, 20 years ago, which in my world would be a dream, it's already out of date. Depending on, depending on the meanings, you know, if it's a word for mobile phone or a word for cool, yeah. But if it's a butcher, a tire, you know. OK, so this links to my next quote, which I've just mentioned beforehand, is the relationship to citizens and nations. So I'm particularly thinking of the Bajuni Islands. It's an island which is essentially halfway between Kenya and Somalia. Yeah. So people will claim to be from the Bajuni Islands, because then they're from Somalia and then not from Kenya. People from the Bajuni Islands traditionally speak Swahili. But anyone who's born in the last 20 years, you know, is more like to speak Swahili, like Tanzanian or Kenyan. And all these things are... Right, right, right, right, right. And in the absence of, yeah, records, what do you do, who do you do, what do you do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think this is, like, real, as you say, an ethical concern and issues that are reasonably complicated. Yeah. And as an academic, I'm like, well, what do you do? Yeah, sure. Well, thank you very much. So in a particular case of Arabic, we do have this atlas. And so, you know, I may, I don't know. I feel conflicted about it, but I may as well just be upfront. As I said before, you know, I'm very pro-immigration, you know, like economic migrant is used as a kind of slur. But I got nothing against economic migrants, let alone genuine asylum seekers. And so I would like to facilitate the claiming of asylum in the UK. And I'm fortunate that I have tools that enable me to do so. In the case of East Africa, I think there, the only option is to do what this guy, Peter Patrick, at Essex does. So he's basically the kind of Lado guru. And he's done, you know, dozens and dozens of Lado reports, despite he's a sociolinguist. And, you know, he's done most of these reports, are about Somali and Arabic and perhaps languages of Afghanistan, Tigrinia and so on. He doesn't speak any of these languages, have any expertise in any of these languages. So what he always does is undermine the whole principle of the thing. Both in general, but also specifically. So, you know, this is a bit trite and compressed into a few seconds. But if you said you wanted to do this, my advice to you would be look at the initial report and say that it is far too simplistic. Because that's basically what seems to always be the case. And you can't do better than that. You know, I can do that. And I can also make some kind of positive case. But if you can't do that, you just make a negative case. And that's also OK. All right. Thank you, Chris. Thank you very much.