Language & Communication 44 (2015) 72–81

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Language & Communication

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/langcom

Asylum and superdiversity: The search for denotational

accuracy during asylum hearings
Marco Jacquemet*
University of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA 94117, United States

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Using ethnographic evidence from asylum cases in various European states, this paper
Available online 6 January 2015 explores the problematic search for denotational referentiality during asylum hearings.
The claim of this paper is that superdiverse, multilingual environments cause Western
Keywords: institutions to depend heavily on denotational signs (such as proper names) to determine
Superdiversity asylum seekers’ credibility. Asylum officers, in particular, routinely rely on common-sense
Multilingualism
assumptions about the denotational power of proper names (especially the ease of
Institutional talk
translating personal and place names) to determine the credibility of a particular testi-
Referential practices
Credibility
mony. However, this reliance on denotation can have serious negative effects on asylum
Asylum seekers adjudication, especially in the assessment of asylum applicants’ referential accuracy, which
is considered a litmus test for determining applicants’ credibility.
Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Superdiversity, multilingualism, and institutional settings

The last three decades have been characterized by the progressive globalization of communicative practices and social
formations resulting from the increasing mobility of people, languages, and texts (Giddens, 1990; Appadurai, 1996; Jameson
and Miyoshi, 1998; Tomlinson, 1999; Nederveen Pieterse, 2003; Pennycook, 2007). Sophisticated technologies for rapid
human mobility and electronic global communicationdsuch as high-capacity airplanes, television cable lines and satellite
link-ups, fixed and mobile telephony, and the Internetdare producing communicative environments where multiple lan-
guages and multiple channels of interaction are simultaneously evoked by transnational speakers no longer anchored in
clearly identifiable national languages (De Swaan, 2001; Jacquemet, 2005; Danet and Herring, 2007; Pennycook, 2007).
European scholars working on this cluster of mobile people and mobile media are increasingly evoking the paradigm of
“superdiversity” to refer to the vastly increased range of linguistic, religious, ethnic, and cultural resources characterizing late-
modern societies. The term was coined by Steve Vertovec in a review of demographic and socio-economic changes in post-
Cold War Britain: “Super-diversity underscores the fact that the new conjunctions and interactions of variables that have
arisen over the past decade surpass the ways - in public discourse, policy debates and academic literature - that we usually
understand diversity in Britain.” (2007: 1025).
As Blommaert and Rampton (2011) pointed out, superdiversity should be understood as diversification of diversity due to
changes in migration patterns in Europe and elsewhere. This diversity cannot be understood in terms of multiculturalism (the
presence of multiple cultures in one society) alone. At the basis of this shift are the changing patterns and itineraries of

* Tel.: þ1 4154225543.
E-mail address: mjacquemet@usfca.edu.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2014.10.016
0271-5309/Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
 M. Jacquemet / Language & Communication 44 (2015) 72–81 73

migration into Europe and the continued migration by the same people inside Europe: “More people are now moving from
more places, through more places, to more places” (Vertovec, 2010:86). In effect, people bring with them ever more varied
resources and experiences from different places in their everyday interactions and encounters with others and institutions.
The term “superdiversity” does have numerous limitations and a growing list of critics who object to its imprecise
theoretical fuzziness, a lack of engagement with political theory, a metropolitan Eurocentric bias, and a neo-liberal euphoric
thrust, exemplified by the prefix “super.”.1 Nevertheless, this concept captures the mutated reality of contemporary
metropolitan life. The world is now full of settings where deterritorialized speakers use a mixture of languages in interacting
with family, friends, and coworkers; read English and other “global” languages on their computer screens; watch local,
regional, or global broadcasts; and access popular culture in a variety of languages. Such settings will become ever more
widespread in the future and superdiversity will become the standard modality.
However, there are negative consequences about living in a superdiverse environment. One of the most serious of these
may be an increasing lack of predictability. As Blommaert argues, a few decades ago it would have been possible to predict
with some degree of certainty what a 14-year-old grade-school student in an European metropolis would be like: her looks,
mother tongue, religious affiliation, cultural preferences, and musical taste were much more restricted than what we observe
today. Now the identities of native-born and immigrants alike are impossible to predict. Blommaert observes, “[t]he pre-
suppositions of common integration policies - that we know who the immigrants are, and that they have a shared language
and culture - can no longer be upheld” (2010: 7).
This lack of predictability is particularly vexing for the apparatuses of national sovereignty. Needing to regulate access to
state-controlled resources by a wider range of speakers (from natives to aliens) but unable to ensure smooth institutional
interactions, nation-states have grudgingly set up procedures to handle not only the local population but also the growing
number of deterritorialized speakers and their multiple languages.
In this paper I document a particular kind of institutional encounter: that between state officials and asylum seekers, who
make up what some might consider the most confounding category of international migrant. Most Western nations (as well
as international organizations such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the Jesuit Refugee Service)
have set up facilities run by one or more officials, who attempt to handle the various needs of asylum seekers by providing
them with interpreters, access to websites containing information useful to their cases, and the services of lawyers, social
workers, and cultural mediators.
Despite such efforts, the asylum process remains a site where multilingual practices come into conflict with national
language ideologies. State bureaucrats in particular impose norms and forms (shaped by national concerns and ethnocentric
cultural assumptions) on immigrants barely able to understand the nation’s local language, let alone state officials’ procedures
for conducting in-depth interviews, writing reports, and producing the records required in order for institutions to grant
refugees access to local resources (Eades and Arends, 2004; Pollabauer, 2004; Maryns and Blommaert, 2001; Blommaert,
2009).
During the asylum process, state and international agencies focus mostly on the denotational axis (the link between
description and the thing or event described) to determine the credibility of an asylum seeker’s application. Applicants are
asked at various steps in the procedure to provide denotational information (personal names, date and place of birth, names
of relatives, place names, etc.), which is then probed by officers in order to assess the credibility of the applicants’ claims. In
this context, asylum seekers are responsible for the accuracy of their statements, while examiners and adjudicators use the
communicative power of their techno-political practices (questioning, producing a record, checking databases, and so on) to
ensure that applicants’ claims are verifiable in accordance with dominant understandings of the referential world. In such a
multilingual environment, the officers’ search for, and the applicants’ production of, the proper reference is rendered
problematic by the intercultural breakdowns resultant from discrepant semiotics of the referential world. As a result, ap-
plicants need to make sure that the denotational information they supply is properly produced and interpreted, or face the
charge of being not credibledwhich in the cases discussed below may mean incarceration, deportation, torture, and death.

1
Scholarly understanding of diversity is undergoing a paradigmatic shift. The concept of superdiversity reflects new preoccupations for both scholars
and policy-makers and as such deserves our attention. Yet, because of its development in a European context, it suffers from an undeniable Eurocentric
perspective and, ironically, lacks historical perspective. Finally, scholars who use it to replace “multilingualism,” especially in policy debates, may have
inadvertently opted for a neoliberal slant echoing the euphoric representation of a contemporary world of new media, big data, and “supersizes” (Reyes,
2014). Nevertheless, the phenomena that the term “superdiversity” seeks to address are real and deserve our attention, particularly if we extend this
concept’s reach to the analysis of the communicative mutations resulting not only from complex migration flows but also from developments in the field of
communication technologies. The contemporary complexity of migration depends on, and is enabled by, communicative technologies that have made
digital media accessible to everyone, via mobile phones and linked computers, producing an epochal transformation in access to knowledge infrastructure
(just think of Google) and in long-distance interactions. Transcontinental travels, transnational moves, chain migrations, and diasporic networks have been
greatly facilitated by these new technologies. In turn, migration and technological innovations result in mutated communicative repertoires and more
complex forms of communication. However, language scholars have been slow to examine the intersection of mobile people and mobile texts. In the last
decade, we can find solid work on migration and language and also heightened attention to the linguistic analysis of electronic technologies, but there has
been very little work that combines these two fields. Blommaert (2011) is a notable exception, as is the work of Jørgensen et al., (2011). I believe that the
concept of “superdiversity” should be stretched to include not only migrants’ linguistic practices on the ground but also their (and everybody else’s) digital
interactions. It is with this perspective that elsewhere (Jacquemet, 2005) I developed the concept of “transidiomatic practices,” and I continue to investigate
this intersection of media and migration in my forthcoming book (Jacquemet, 2015).
74 M. Jacquemet / Language & Communication 44 (2015) 72–81

In the next section, I will explore the problematic nature of this denotational search within a superdiverse, multilingual
environment by looking at both external and internal referential practices and misaligned denotational markers.

2. The problem with names

The credibility of asylum seekers is in large part shaped by officials’ expectations of denotational-referential accuracy in
their narrative performance, a fact also acknowledged by the interview guidelines of the United Nations High Commissioner
for Refugees: “(The interviewer must) assess the credibility of the person being interviewed by examining the testimony for
internal consistency (the coherence of the statement) and external consistency (agreement with known facts)” (UNHCR, 1995:
16, my emphasis).
When regulatory agencies such as the UNHCR seek internal and external consistency in a statement, they act upon deep-
seated institutional needs for syntagmatic and intertextual coherence. All descriptions produced in an institutional setting
(including asylum claims) are expected to string individual and separate facts (persons, times, and places) into a consistent
and realistic temporal flow; the agencies must then check these descriptions for contradictions and mistakes. In the asylum
process, an agency assesses the internal coherence of a claim by evaluating the consistency of a single performance (for
instance, the initial interview) as well as through the intertextual comparison of statements made during the standard three
stages of the application process, i.e., the initial interview with an immigration officer, the proper hearing in front of an
asylum board, and the eventual appeal. In all these stages, references to people, places, and times must remain consistent, and
any referential departures from previous statements can have disastrous implications for the applicant’s credibility. Finally,
examiners are also directed to pay attention to “external consistency” in their determination of credibility; that is, they should
be able to match the proper names produced by an asylum seeker with factual information about the world “out there.”
The checking and rechecking of facts (including places, times, and persons) depends upon the assumption that truth-
telling is connected with remembering information clearly and consistently; if an applicant cannot recount facts clearly
and consistently, she must not be telling the truth. This taken-for-granted link between truth and memory provides a gold
standard for most institutional examinations, even though research has shown that people’s memory for details such as dates
and times is notoriously unreliable (Bohmer and Shuman, 2007).
As I have argued elsewhere (Jacquemet, 2013), one of the consequences of superdiversity is the inability to assume shared
knowledgedhence indexical knowledge. This can be problematic when indexicality is activated by asylum seekers relying on
shifters as reference markers. Shifters are linguistic signs which shift reference from occasion to occasion or from one ut-
terance to the next; as such, they rely on context to be disambiguated. However, shared context is precisely what cannot be
taken for granted in a superdiverse environment.
This is particularly evident when applicants use kin terms in their stories. Kin terms, unlike personal names, shift reference
in at least two ways. Within a single language, their referent is relative and can shift from one individual to another (when I say
“my uncle,” the referent is different than when you say “my uncle”), resulting in a low referential accuracy. More importantly, in
the case of multilingual or multicultural contexts, kin terms can connect to radically different referents (the referential target of
the English term “uncle” may different significantly from the referential target covered by a similar term in, say, Kannada).
In asylum hearings, the task of disambiguating this terminological uncertainty is in the hands of immigration officers who,
in many instances, lack the cultural knowledge necessary to understand the contextual implications of the referential
practices of asylum-seekers. Such is the case with referential practices based on non-Western kinship arrangements. In an
asylum case documented by Good (2007) which I previously discussed (Jacquemet, 2011), the United Kingdom Home Office
Presenting Officer (HOPO) attempted to invalidate an asylum-seeker’s testimony by comparing it with her husband’s testi-
mony and pointing out a perceived discrepancy regarding the identity of a relative. In talking about her marriage, she said that
her grandfather had suggested the marriage. Previously, her husband had testified that his grandfather had suggested the
marriage. The presenting officer pounced on her statement, applying his own understanding of normative British kinship
system to question the credibility of the witness. He was clearly unaware of the typical South Asian cross-cousin marriage
pattern, where it is common for a husband and wife to share the same grandfather. Fortunately for this couple, the adjudicator
had already encountered other cases of cross-cousin marriages and promptly shut down the presenting officer. Good con-
cludes: “The HOPO looked utterly baffled, but got the message that for reasons unclear to him the adjudicator was not
impressed by this major ‘discrepancy’ he had unearthed.” (2007:179). We can well imagine a situation where an adjudicator
not so familiar with South Asian cross-cousin marriage patterns would have been misled by the apparent discrepancy, with
dire consequences for the asylum seeker’s credibility.
Although asylum seekers are provided with linguistic interpreters, the asylum procedure does not require examining
officers to be culturally fluent (let alone empathetic). Moreover, the asymmetrical power relationship inherent in such en-
counters allows these officersdwho are, after all, in the dominant positiondto dismiss any need to take into account the
cultural alterity of their interlocutors. State officials routinely rely on their own local understanding of the factors that
establish credibility, an understanding that asylum seekers do not necessarily share. As a result, the testimony of asylum
seekers is routinely framed by officials as “difficult” and “problematic” and is handled with suspicion.
In order to limit indexical uncertainty in superdiverse, multilingual institutional encounters, the denotational reference
that officials most frequently seek to elicit and monitor is proper names, in particular, personal and place names. Based on my
own ethnographic interviews with asylum officers as well as on the existing literature, we can assert that the reasons for this
(over)reliance on proper names are multiple:
 M. Jacquemet / Language & Communication 44 (2015) 72–81 75

1) Institutional agents (judges, police officers, bureaucrats, etc.) view proper names, unlike shifters, as stable signs that are
easily transferrable across languages. Proper names are (erroneously) believed to survive the translation from one lan-
guage to another in a fairly stable, recognizable form. They are believed to carry denotation but not connotation (an idea
that goes back to Mill, 1843).
2) These same agents thus attribute to proper names high referential value (“John F. Kennedy was assassinated on Friday,
November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas” has higher referential value than “the president was killed in the sixties”).
3) Hence they believe that proper names boost referential accuracy, making it possible to investigate the credibility of a claim,
witness account, or testimony.
4) Finally, they routinely use proper names to examine and create files. In this sense, proper names function as specific
communicative technologies used to impose disciplinary power (Foucault, 1980, cf. also Battaglia’s “representational
economy” 1995 and Butler’s “sovereign performatives” 1997).

I saw this denotational obsession at work in Albania in the 1990s during the asylum hearings devised by the UNHCR to
determine the credibility of Kosovar refugees. For instance, in order to establish their claim of being Kosovars, asylum ap-
plicants were quizzed on their geographical knowledge of their area of origin instead of being allowed to tell the stories of
their ordeal (Jacquemet, 2000, 2010). In the following example, a Japanese national and UNHCR official (O in the transcript)
interviewed a Gheg Albanian-speaking asylum seeker (AS) via an interpreter, also Gheg (I). She asked the applicant to
demonstrate his link to Kosovo by providing place names of the area, thus proving his knowledge of the region (and sup-
posedly his social identity as a Kosovar).

(1) Registration Office, UNHCR, Tirana March 8, 2000

AS young man, Gheg Albanian
I young man, Gheg Albanian
O young woman, Japanese

O4I
O so can you ask him some questions about this part of Kosovo?
I4R
I pa thuma tash ndonjë fshat të rrethinës së malishevës aty? I now, can you name any village of the Malisheva area?
AS po (..) është- belanica/thuj mbas qysh i thone belza- baja- prejucaki- seniti- AS yes..there is- Belanica and after it I say Belza, Baja,
është:: (..) si e ke emrin- është klecka një-një lagje komplet në prizren- sa thashë Prejucaki, Seniti, then:: .. what’s its name . Klecka, this
unë- pese t’i? thashe? (..) pastaj vjen durgazi- vjen bllaca- vjen kemecia- asht¼ is a- a- large neighbourhood in Prizren- how many did
I mention? five? (..) then there’s Durgazi then Bllaca,
then Kemecia, that’s it¼
I ¼shume mire I ¼very good!
O4I
I yes he knows well that region.

In this case, the interpreter was familiar with the area being described and was able to immediately vouch for the
credibility of the applicant. In cases where the interpreter was not familiar with the applicant’s hometown, the interpreter
would compare the applicant’s description with maps of villages and towns hand-drawn by other refugees at the request of
the UNHCR. Or the interpreter would ask about the nearest large town, the villages that one passes en route to that town, or
the name of the most important mosque or bridge in the area. Here again, the interpreter would often consult maps drawn up
exclusively to verify the answer’s accuracy (Jacquemet, 2010).
Quick and unproblematic examinations such as the above have been, unfortunately, quite rare in my own observations in Italy
and Albania as well as in a review of the published works on asylum claims in Belgium (Maryns, 2005; Blommaert, 2001; Maryns
and Blommaert, 2001) and United Kingdom (Bohmer and Shuman, 2007; Good, 2007). For the many applicants with faulty
memory for names or too traumatized by the entire process to think clearly, the inability to offer accurate place names could spell
trouble. Such was the case of an old woman who arrived in the UNHCR offices quite distressed and traumatized after an alleged
trek across the mountains separating Kosovo from Albania. She was clearly not in the mood to answer geographical queries:

(2) UNHCR, Tirana March 10, 2000

AS old woman, Gheg Albanian
I young man, Gheg Albanian
O young woman, Japanese

I prej nga ke erdhe- ka ke shku? I which way did you come? which way?
AS vec kena ece nuk e di rruges qe me ardhe aty masandej kena ece AS we just walked the roads, I don’t know, to get there then
malit kena ece- na kane lshu neper fusha aty naten- we climbed the mountains, we spread among the fields at night-
I ¼no she is saying the only- ¼ I no, she only says
AS ¼na kane pru gjeneralet ketu¼ AS (the generals pushed us this way)
I wmountains wfields wmountains wfields I mountains, fields, mountains, fields,
O uh uh O yes
76 M. Jacquemet / Language & Communication 44 (2015) 72–81

I nothing elsen no names of villages or town or- some place where are I nothing else, no names of villages or town or some places
people living/ no names where people are living no names.
O uh uh O yes
I only mountains wfields I only mountains and fields.
(30 sec.) (30 seconds pause)
O ask about marriage O enquire about her marriage
I celebrim e ke bo me të? I were you legally married?
AS po ne gjakove AS yes in Gjakova
I yes in gjakova I yes in Gjakova
O uh uh O ok
I ¼they made¼ I (they made-)
O ¼ yeah in ¼ which kind of organization? O yes, which organization (married you)?
I ne çfarë lloj- ndertese keni shku? Çfarë lloj organizate? Ku e kini I in which building did you go? what sort of organization?
bo ate martese? where did you sign your marriage?
AS martesen- ne gjakove- AS marriage? in Gjakova
I ku- ne gjakove po ne rregull- ne rregull ne gjakove- ku? Ku ne I where in Gjakova? Ok? all right, all right, in Gjakova,
gjakove? ne cvend? but where? where in Gjakova? in which place?
AS ne ndertese po smund e mbaj mend vendin. AS in a building but I can’t recall the place
I cila ndertese? Ku? I Which building? Where?
AS as ia di emrin vallahi AS I don’t know its name, I swear.
I no answer- she say I don’t know the name of that- building- or I no answer she says “I don’t know the name of the building,
organization or institution or organization, or institution.”

In this case, the interpreter was quick to lose his patience and interrupt the applicant by pointing out to the officer the
denotational indeterminacy of the answer (“mountain and fields, mountain and fields, no names”), which in his view clearly
undermined the credibility of the applicant’s claim. Even when the UN officer sought to give another chance to the applicant,
she prompted the interpreter to ask the applicant the name of the organization or the building in which she was married.
Again, the asylum-seeker came up short, leaving both officer and interpreter dissatisfied and skeptical about her claim.
The literature on asylum is also full of cases where asylum officers, relying on their common-sensical assumptions about
proper names, misinterpret the intended referent, with high risk of credibility loss for the asylum seeker. In the final section of
this paper, I will examine cases where failure to provide the proper name led to catastrophic results for the applicant’s
credibility.

3. Personal names and communicative breakdowns

Personal names enter the asylum process at multiple levels, from the apparently simple task of proving one’s identity to
the more involved process of providing external denotational references to corroborate the applicant’s claim.
The difficulty of proving asylum applicants’ identities lies at the heart of the asylum process. How can they prove they are
who they claim to be (thus deserving of asylum) when in most cases they lack identity papers or any other kind of supporting
evidence? In most cases, asylum seekers have had to compromise their identity: they may have destroyed their documents to
conceal their identity from pursuers; their documents may have become irremediably damaged and unreadable along the
way; they may have left them behind in their rush to escape; they may have had to forge fake identities; or they may never
have had any identity papers to start with. This latter case is more complex than a case of missing documents. As Bohmer and
Shuman stated: “The applicants themselves find the whole idea of needing documents to prove identity incomprehensible.
For them, identity is about much more than one’s name on an unforged document” (2007: 88).
In the Italian situation, most asylum seekers arrive on small boats overloaded with people. In most cases, they carry a
minimal amount of baggage, or none at all, and the majority lack identity papers. As a result, one of the first acts they are
asked to perform in front of Italian immigration officers is to provide their names. This act, however, is far from unprob-
lematic. Italian officers unfamiliar with foreign names, lacking proper interpreting support, and under pressure to process a
boatful of people as expeditiously as possible routinely make mistakes in transcribing the names of asylum-seekers. These
failed “mini entextualizations” can have serious consequences for the asylum seekers later on (Jacquemet, 2009).
For instance, an Italian nongovernmental organization working on behalf of refugees reported the case of Mr. Boukhari, a
refugee from Southern Morocco. Mr. Boukhari did not understand Italian, but he could speak some French words. The officer
processing his case in the Identification Center in Lampedusa wrote down his name incorrectly in the transcription of the
hearing. To compound the mistake, Mr. Boukhari, unfamiliar with the Roman alphabet, did not realize the spelling was wrong
when he signed the report. He was admitted to the country on humanitarian grounds and was granted a one-year stay permit.
Once settled, he applied for a permanent work visa. When the Italian Immigration Office reviewed his application, they
discovered the difference between the name recorded in his first interview in the Identification Center and the name he was
using in his application for a work permit. He was accused of having entered the country under a false name and his one-year
stay permit was revoked (Rovelli, 2006:151).
In a similar case, Mr. Adesida, a Nigerian refugee, had been admitted to Italy in 2003 and given a one-year work permit.
When the permit was about to expire, he went to the Immigration Office to renew it, where he was arrested on the grounds
that he had filed his request under a false name. It turned out that the report of his original interview had omitted one of his
 M. Jacquemet / Language & Communication 44 (2015) 72–81 77

four personal names. Not only was his renewal denied, but he was arrested and confined in Milan’s detention center for
undocumented migrants, from which he was sent back to Nigeria (ICS, 2005:56).
If establishing one’s own identity can be problematic, establishing the identities of the applicants’ references is a process
even more fraught with difficulties, misunderstandings, and antagonistic uptakes.
Legal counsels and other humanitarian agencies preparing asylum seekers for their deposition are keenly aware of the
need to have the applicants provide concrete references for their claims. The following excerpt is from an interview conducted
by a lawyer (Law) together with an interpreter (I) working pro-bono for an Italian humanitarian agency (Senza Confine). It took
place just days before the applicant (AS) was due to appear in front of the Asylum Territorial Commission in Rome (turns
marked with [xxx] were spoken in Kurmanji and have been omitted for textual simplicity):

(3) Senza Confine, Roma, May 22, 2009

AS young man, Kurdish
I young man, Kurdish
Law young woman, Italian

I e la famiglia è ancora perseguita quando fermano ai posti di I and the family is still persecuted when they are stopped at
blocco chiedono di loro checkpoints they ask about them
Law e chi glielo ha detto? Law and who told him this fact?
I dal villaggio¼ I the village
Law ¼da chi? da chi? è mica un coro greco Law who? who? they are not a Greek chorus!
I kè tera got? I xxx
AS zavè min AS xxx
I il cognato¼ I his brother-in-law
Law ¼perchè non voleva dirlo? Law and why didn’t want to say it?
I forse aveva paura del cognato¼ I maybe he’s afraid for his brother-in-law
Law ¼chiedilo a lui Law ask him
I çe ma te berè negot? I xxx
AS ahakari AS xxx
I beh, noi diciamo la gente il cognato ha saputo da un altro signore I well, we say the people the brother-in-law heard it from another
del villaggio e li hanno informati man in the village and they told them
Law CHI li ha informati? Law WHO told them?
I kè tera got? I xxx
AS zavè min AS xxx
I il cognato I the brother-in-law
Law vabbene, nome? Law alright! What’s his name?
I navè wi çiye? I xxx
AS Hussein Ocalan AS Hussein Ocalan
Law ooo::! Law finally!

The purpose of the interview was to prepare the applicant for his appearance at the Asylum Territorial Commission. He
had been previously advised about the need to be concrete and to provide clear references in his answers. Therefore,
when he brought up the fact that he knew that the Turkish police were still looking for him and his brother, the lawyer
promptly interjected, asking for a name. After his reply (“the village”) she quickly became upset, asking for a proper name
(“who? who?”) and sarcastically adding that a “Greek chorus” is not an acceptable reference. The applicant finally pro-
duced a kin term (“my brother-in-law”) but the lawyer was not content (and rightly so, given the flaccidity of kin de-
nominators as discussed above) and was unrelenting until her client coughed up his brother-in-law’s personal name
(“Hussein Ocalan”).
In another case, analyzed by Katrijn Maryns (2005) in discussing the Belgian asylum process, cultural assumptions about
the importance and relevance of personal and place names also take center stage in the interview and entextualization of the
hearing. In her lengthy analysis of an asylum hearing (Koulagna case, pp. 14–160), Maryns describes how, in questioning the
asylum-seeker (AS in the transcript below), the officer (O) focused on the identity of the people involved in the applicant’s
narration of his prison time and eventual escape. In recalling his time in prison, the asylum-seeker mentioned the death of a
fellow inmate. As a result of his illness and his fellow inmate’s death, he was sent to a hospital where he enlisted the help of a
boy to escape (2005: 67):

(4) Belgian Asylum Courts (Maryns, 2005: 160)

AS man,
O woman, Belgian

AS I was sent to the hospital and a nurse warned me to run away then one day a boy come and I told him to go to my business, to Pete for my
driving license, and he came back with a loaf of bread with the driving license in it
O what’s the name of the boy?
AS I don’t know his proper name
O ok
78 M. Jacquemet / Language & Communication 44 (2015) 72–81

Later on he testified that he was arrested again, and he described the arrival in jail of an important inmate, the brother of a
local police officer, whose name he did not know (2005: 69). The lack of denotational specificity hurt his case. In their initial
assessment, the asylum court stressed the applicant’s inability to provide proper names:
The applicant spent a lot of time in prison, was tortured, didn’t see his family. Until somebody died (the applicant
does not know his name).. One day a boy came to give food to a patient. Before that, a nurse had warned him
already that he should escape but he said that he did not have the strength to do so. When that boy came (the
applicant does not know his name, NW 4060B) he told him to go to his work place.. The applicant was handcuffed,
the legs also, he was there until March 2001, then a brother of a police officer was brought in. The very same day the
commissioner came with a higher official (the applicant does not know names of any of them) (Maryns, 2005: 152–
153, emphasis added).
The asylum claim was consequently denied because of the asylum-seeker’s lack of credibility. In the final verdict the court
cites, among other factors, his lack of knowledge of proper names: “It is little acceptable that the applicant does not know the
name of the boy who died and who was also locked up in the same cell as the applicant, or the name of the boy who played
such a role in his escape. It is also striking that the applicant does not know the name of the brother of the police officer, the
police commissioner himself and the higher officer who came to release the brother.. From what precedes it becomes clear
that the application of the person concerned is deceptive” (Maryns, 2005: 161).
This judgment fails to take into account that knowledge of personal names is highly variable across cultures: in some
cultures names may not be fixed but endlessly changing (Enfield and Stivers, 2007); in others people may use kin terms in
referring to people (Hanks, 2007), discourage sharing personal names with strangers (for instance the Tuareg studied by
Youssouf et al., 1976), or prefer nicknames or generic names (Jacquemet, 1992). The judgment also fails to acknowledge
Western officials’ habit of judging a testimony credible based on an applicant’s ability to provide proper (i.e., verifiable
and objective) identification, so that the absence of names becomes a sign of the unreliability of the applicant’s
deposition.
Let us look at another case studied by Maryns (2005), in which she highlights the difficulty of relying on a common
language poorly spoken by all participants. The official and the asylum seeker in this case were not only separated by their
radically different power positions and motivations (the asylum seeker needing to tell her story, the officer seeking incon-
trovertible evidence that could be checked and cross-examined) but their communication was also hampered by the fact that
they used a lingua franca (English in this case) with which they were both uncomfortable. In the example below, the officer
was French Belgian, while the asylum seeker was from Darfur:

(5) Belgian Asylum Courts (Maryns, 2005: 280–281)

AS woman, Sudanese (probably Fur)

O woman, Belgian

O I gonna start with the story so what happened to you in Sudan that you have to leave the country
[30 lines omitted]
AS don’t- when they are fighting we run
O you just run away uhum and what happened to you run away . so where to
AS one man . one man carry me, help me
O Karimi
AS yeah
O it was a man or a woman?
AS man

Unfamiliarity with different ways of pronouncing English words, combined with the official’s need for concrete evidence
in the form of a name, produced a classic intercultural communicative misunderstanding based on different ways of speaking:
the asylum seeker’s mention of a person who “carry me” was understood by the officer as the personal name “Karimi.” To
compound the mistake, the claimant seemed to confirm the name suggested by the officialda common instance of gratuitous
concurrence in an institutional setting, whereby the claimant’s preferred second pair-part is usually in agreement with the
first pair-part, produced by the official (see Eades, 2005). This catastrophic miscommunication would later be transcribed in
the official report as: “(.) I left Juba because of fight. Everyone I knew ran away. I could not see anyone anymore and I escaped
as well. A man named Karimi helped me. He brought me somewhere and told me that I was safe.” (Maryns, 2005: 291) Later
on, during her testimony in front of an asylum judge, the asylum seeker was asked to provide more information about
“Karimi.” She obviously could not comply with the request since she did not understand to whom the officer was referring.
This communicative breakdown had the predicable result of undermining her credibility and her entire case was cast into
doubt.
The obsession with proper names also spreads to court interpreters, who in many cases take it upon themselves to seek
and produce clear denotational references. In the following Italian case, the interpreter (I), a young woman quite fluent in the
applicant’s first language (Kurmanji) but unfamiliar with the political situation in Turkish Kurdistan, lexicalized and trans-
formed into a proper name the action narrated by the applicant:
 M. Jacquemet / Language & Communication 44 (2015) 72–81 79

(6) Commissione Territoriale, Roma May, 26, 2009

AS young man, Kurmanji/Turkish
I young woman, Kurmanji/Turkish/Italian/English
O young woman, Italian/French

O allora perche’ i militari turchi ce l’avevano con lei? O so, why the Turkish army was after you?
I cima leshkerè tirka tera neyarti dikirin? I why the army was after you?
AS min arikari dida kurda u leshkerè kurda AS because I helped the Kurds and the Kurd army
I aiutava i kurdi e l’armata kurda I he helped the Kurds and its army
O come l’aiutavate? O how did you help it?
I çawa te wanra arikari dikir? I how did you help them?
AS min arikari dida wan kesè ciyada gerila bun AS I helped the people waging a guerrilla war in the mountains
I aiutava i Guerrigli . sono dei soldati kurdi I he helped the Guerrigli . they are Kurdish soldiers
O I Guerrigli . questi non li ho mai sentiti . e chi sono? O The Guerrigli? . these ones, I never heard of . and who are they
I kène ew? I who are they?
AS ewana kesè arikariyè gelè me kurdara dikin Ewana gelè mera AS they do stuff for the Kurd people they help our people
arikariyè dikin
I sono quelli che fanno qualcosa per i kurdi che aiutano la I they are those who do things for the Kurds they help our people
nostra gente
O sono armati? O are they armed?
I cekè wan hene? I do they bear arms?
AS erè, hema mera tishteki nabèjin AS yes, but they don’t hurt us
I si, ma a noi ci fanno niente I yes, but they don’t hurt us
O e grazie! ma allora chi attaccano? popolazione o militari? O well, I would hope so! So, whom do they target? the Turkish
population or just the Army?
I ser kèda digrin ser gelè weda yan ser leshkeran? I what are their targets the Turkish population or just the Army?
AS ser leshkeran u ser qereqolada AS army people and barracks
I militari e caserme I military personnel and barracks

[Fourteen minutes omitted]

O e che rapporti ci sono tra il PKK e questi Guerrigli che ho sentito O and what kind of relationship is there between the PKK and these
qui per la prima volta e che il collega non trova su internet?¼ Guerrigli that I heard here for the first time and that my
colleague cannot find on internet?
Law ¼guardi che c’è un errore di traduzione, lui ha detto che aiutava la Law I believe there’s a translation mistake he said he helped the
guerriglia, cioè il PKK guerrilla that is, the PKK
O ah, voi aiutavate dei guerriglieri del PKK? . chiedi un pò? O ok then, you helped the PKK guerrilla? . [to I] can you ask him?
I we arikari PKK è ra dikir? I did you help the PKK
AS erè AS yes
I si, aiutava il PKK I yes, he helped the PKK
O oh, meno male. O well, finally!
(.) (.)
O e il PKK è anche conosciuto con un altro nome? O Is the PKK also known with a different name?
I pkk bi naveki dinè ra ji tè naskirinè? I the PKK, is it know with another name?
AS KADEK AS KADEK
O vabbene O very good.

When asked how he came to be persecuted by the Turkish Army, the applicant replied (in Kurmanji) that he helped the
“people waging a guerrilla war in the mountains.” This description was translated by the interpreter as “i Guerrigli”
(which in English could be rendered as “the Warriors”). Faced with a proper name she had not encountered in her five
years of deposing Kurdish asylum seekers, the officer expressed her skeptical curiosity and probed the applicant for more
information. After more than fifteen minutes of an explanation that turned increasingly rambling and nonsensical, the
officer once again expressed her skepticism about the existence of this guerrilla organization (“that I heard about here
from the first time”). At this point, the applicant’s lawyer felt compelled to intervene and clarify that the “Guerrigli” were
really the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (in Kurdish: Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan). Once the officer ascertained that the
applicant was indeed referring to the PKK when the interpreter translated his words as “Guerrigli,” she quickly moved to
establish an internal reference by asking the applicant whether the PKK had been known by a different name. When he
provided the correct answer, “KADEK,” the acronym for the Freedom and Democracy Congress of Kurdistan (Kongreya
Azadî û Demokrasiya Kurdistanê), she was finally satisfied with his accuracy and expressed her satisfaction. Note how in
the last turn, once the applicant produced the proper names, the officer did not wait for the interpreter because she
immediately recognized the proper name, with which she was already familiar. It took fifteen minutes but we arrived at a
successful decoding of the proper reference. The asylum seeker was subsequently given the status of refugee and allowed
to remain in Italy.

4. Conclusions

Up until the late 1970s, agencies in charge of asylum determination placed a disproportionate emphasis on the applicants’
stories. In the absence of written evidence, applicants were prompted to demonstrate their credibility by means of a detailed
80 M. Jacquemet / Language & Communication 44 (2015) 72–81

narration of their stories. Evidence provided directly by asylum-seekers was awarded a high value and was generally accepted
at its face value (Fassin and Rechtman, 2009).
Starting in the 1980s, however, almost all Western nations (the final destination of most asylum seekers) introduced
policies to restrict immigration and make it more difficult to qualify as a refugee. This shift was the result of multiple factors: a
steep increase in the number of displaced people due to geopolitical instability across the globe, easier access to routes and
networks to gain entry into Western nations, a political redefinition of who counts as “refugee” caused by the waning of the
Cold War, the emergence of xenophobic parties in most asylum-granting countries, and the widespread perception that most
asylum claims were bogus.
In the asylum process, policies to restrict immigration led to an ideology of suspicion. Asylum agencies no longer took for
granted the credibility of applicants’ testimony. Asylum depositions increasingly assumed the flavor of cross-examinations,
with asylum officers systematically and harshly questioning applicants’ narratives, seeking to pinpoint their referential ac-
curacy, and at times curtailing their stories altogether (Jacquemet, 2010). A variety of denotational markersdincluding
personal names, as explored above, but also place names, temporal markers, body scars presented as evidence of torture,
etc.dcame under particular scrutiny. For the suspicious officer, proper names became the litmus test to locate the asylum
claim in socio-historical space and time and to assess its accuracy and reliability.
However, as demonstrated by the data discussed above, this search for denotational accuracy presents many weaknesses
and pitfalls, potentially leading to adjudication mistakes and violations of the right to asylum. In these cases, far from being
simple descriptors, proper names become evidence of the lack of shared knowledge characterizing these superdiverse,
multilingual institutional encounters. This causes an inferential avalanche of serious consequences: suspicion based on lack of
shared knowledge leads to misunderstandings, and this in turn leads to a loss of credibility for the asylum-seeker. Credibility
is gained incrementally but is lost catastrophically: a single erroneousdor perceivably erroneousdproper name can erase in a
second the positive effect of a solid, hour-long presentation of substantiated evidence.
As one solution, asylum adjudicators may want to consider the distinction that linguists made long ago between refer-
ential accuracy and interactional efficiency (Donnellan 1990 [1966]; see also Lyons, 1975, Agha, 2007). As pointed out by Agha
(2007: 30), accuracy and effectiveness are quite distinct issues involving two different semiotic relationships: the first in-
volves the axis of denotation (the link between description and the thing or event described), the second the axis of inter-
action (the link between interactants). A referential act is interactionally efficient, regardless of its denotational accuracy, if
interactants have a relatively symmetrical grasp of what the referent is, that is, if they can be said to be “mutually coordinated”
to the referent based on their relative behavior during an interaction (Agha, 2007: 80). Donnellan pointed out that these two
axes (denotation and interaction) may coincide or may not, and that an act of referring may be interactionally successful even
though it is denotationally incorrect (1990 [1966]). For instance, if an asylum seeker testifies that his cellmate in prison was a
man “with an injured leg” and we later find out that the man had a leg defect since birth, an asylum officer can still achieve a
clear understanding of the asylum seeker’s storydand that story can be interactionally efficientdeven if the denotational
load regarding the cellmate was inaccurate. If, on the other hand, an asylum officer seeks complete disambiguation of a
denotational reference, doing so may require more than one turn of speaking before interactants have a symmetric enough
grasp of the referentdwhich few officers are willing or able to do.
In asylum hearings, a shift from accuracy to efficiency would prompt interactants (and asylum officers in particular) to
strive for mutual matching of referential practices through long sequences of turn-taking exchanges, rather than relying on
selected statements (and in some cases on a single statement) to determine denotational accuracy, and hence the applicant’s
credibility. This shift however, could only become possible if asylum-granting nations find the political will to reconsider their
exclusionary immigration practices. In other words, it’s not a simple matter of changing asylum agencies practices because
these practices are linked to political agendas and contexts.
In the current culture of suspicion during asylum hearings, the search for denotational accuracy has in fact become an
exclusionary practice geared to filter out fraudulent claims. Furthermore, denotational signs such as proper names do not
necessarily provide the referential stability that asylum officers seek in superdiverse settings. While it is undeniable that a
portion of asylum claims are bogus and need to be handled accordingly, my concern here is that the stringent search for
denotational certainty may lead to human rights violations, ultimately hurting a great number of peopledrefugees with
legitimate claimsdwhom these asylum agencies are supposed to help. There is the need to shift to a paradigm that supports
asylum seekers’ human rights, including their linguistic and communicative rights, which may include ways of telling stories
and constructing claims that clash with the dominant forms and norms of asylum agencies. In order to do so, these agencies
need to revert to, or at least revisit, their early philosophy about asylum determination and allow the applicants more leeway
in using multiple turns to frame a particular statement, have more patience with looped or circular stories with scarce
denotational load, and pay more attention to the stories themselves, their performative effect, and their overall rhetorical
structure.
This is particularly important when we consider that asylum seekers’ statements and narratives are no longer embedded
in a single dominant language but in the multilingual practices that arise in superdiverse environments shaped by the
reterritorialization of global cultural flows into national political discourses. Participants in such environments (including
more tolerant and welcoming asylum agencies) should consider that successful outcomes are increasingly determined by
their ability to attend precisely to the intercultural nature of these interactions and, in particular, to accommodate for syn-
copated and imprecise narrations, reversals, false starts, and ambiguous turns that are characteristic of asylum narratives. In
other words, asylum commissions need to become aware of the differential power and linguistic skills of all participants, the
 M. Jacquemet / Language & Communication 44 (2015) 72–81 81

impact of unexpected cultural assumptions, and the unevenly distributed ability of the participants to produce institutionally
appropriate and interculturally effective performances.

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this article was presented to conference Language and Superdiversity, at the Jyvaskyla University in
Finland, June 2013. I particularly thank the panel organizers (Becky Schulthies, Paja Faudree, and Marcy Brink Danan), Asif
Agha and Michael Silverstein, for their questions and comments. Finally I want to thank Dawn Cunningham and the editors of
this volume for their advice in the development of the final version of this article.

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