Diana Eades

Expertise:

• Sociolinguistics - Forensic Linguistics

Qualifications:

• BA (Hons) Asian Studies, Australian National University

• PhD Linguistics, University of Queensland

Dr. Diana Eades is Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of New England, NSW, Australia, and Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She has served as President, Vice-President and Secretary of the International Association of Forensic Linguists, and as Vice-President of the Australian Linguistic Society.

Diana Eades is a sociolinguist who has worked on language in legal contexts since the mid-1980s. In the past decade she has become involved in linguistic investigations into LADO. After convening a group of Australian linguists who exposed problems with this practice in Australia, she went on to convene a group of international scholars, the Language & National Origin Group, who developed the Guidelines for the Use of Language Analysis in Relation to Questions of National Origin in Refugee Cases (2004). She is concerned that the newly developing field of LADO should be based on well-researched principles of linguistics, including sociolinguistics, and that linguists working in this area adhere to principles of best practice in the application of scholarly work.

Much of Diana’s other research has focused on Australian Aboriginal speakers of varieties of English in the criminal justice process. She has provided expert evidence to courts and tribunals, and her work is cited as the authority on Aboriginal English in the legal system in government reports, judicial decisions, and legal publications. For more than two decades she has been providing workshops about intercultural communication with Aboriginal people, and communication practices within the legal process, to lawyers, magistrates and judges. In 1992 she published a handbook for lawyers titled Aboriginal English and the Law (Queensland Law Society). In addition to many journal articles and book chapters, her academic work includes the books Courtroom Talk and Neocolonial Control (2008, Mouton de Gruyter) and Sociolinguistics and the Legal Process (2010, Multilingual Matters).

Diana is co-editor of The International Journal of Speech Language and the Law and has been President, Vice-President and Secretary of the International Association of Forensic Linguists. She is on the Editorial Boards of Applied Linguistics and Multilingua.

Diana Eades's webpage

Email:

Diana.Eades        Please add:    @une.edu.au

Related Publications

2010. Guidelines from linguists for LADO. In Language and Origin: The Role of Language in European Asylum Procedures: A Linguistic and Legal Survey, edited by Karin Zwaan, Pieter Muysken and Maaike Verrips. Nijmegen: Wolf Legal Publishers, 35-42.

• explains the origins and motivation, development, authorship and content of the Guidelines, as well as their scholarly and judicial status

2010. Language analysis and asylum cases. In Routledge Handbook of Forensic Linguistics, edited by Malcolm Coulthard and Alison Johnson. London: Routledge, 411-422.

• introduces LADO principles and practice, and presents a sample (complete) LADO report which is then analysed in order to highlight linguistic concerns

2009. Testing the claims of asylum seekers: The role of language analysis. Language Assessment Quarterly 6(1): 30-40.

• argues that much of the analysis of language currently being undertaken in LADO “appears to be quite superficial”.

2007. Review of The Asylum Speaker: Language in the Belgian Asylum Procedure by Katrijn Maryns. Manchester, UK: St Jerome Press. The International Journal of Speech Language and the Law 14(2): 295-300.

• very favourable review of the first sociolinguistic monograph to examine language in the asylum process.

2005. Applied linguistics and language analysis in asylum seeker cases. Applied Linguistics 26(4): 503-526.

• introduces how and why language analysis is carried out in asylum seeker cases; reviews relevant linguistic literature, includes the Guidelines, and discusses the role of applied linguists.

2004. Diana Eades and Jacques Arends. Using language analysis in the determination of national origin of asylum seekers: An introduction. The International Journal of Speech Language and the Law 11(2): 179-199.

• introduces how and why language analysis is carried out in asylum seeker cases; reviews relevant linguistic literature, and examines its practice in the Netherlands in cases of people claiming to be from Sierra Leone

2004. Diana Eades and Jacques Arends (eds.). Special section: Language analysis and determination of nationality. The International Journal of Speech Language and the Law 11(2).

• the first collection of papers on the topic, plus the Guidelines. Papers by Eades and Arends (see above), Singler (Liberian applicants in Switzerland), Maryns (Belgium) and Corcoran (case study of West African applicant in the Netherlands).

2004. (coauthor) Guidelines for the use of language analysis in relation to questions of national origin in refugee cases. The International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law: Forensic Linguistics, 11(2): 261-266. Available at http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/ 

2003. Diana Eades, Helen Fraser, Jeff Siegel, Tim McNamara and Brett Baker. Linguistic identification in the determination of nationality: A preliminary report. Language Policy 2(2): 179-199.

• found that LADO as then used by the Australian government “appears to be based on ‘folk views’ about the relationship between language and nationality and ethnicity, rather than sound linguistic principles”. Examined 58 cases.