The analysis consists of an examination of the dialectologically relevant features (e.g. accent, grammar, vocabulary and loanwords) in the speech of the asylum seeker.
To linguists, this assumption is flawed: instead, research supports links between the family and community in which a person learns their native language, and enduring features of their way of speaking it.
Since the mid-1990s, language analysis has been used to help determine the geographical origin of asylum seekers by the governments of a growing number of countries (Reath, 2004),[14] now including Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
The IND has a specialised unit (Bureau Land en Taal, or BLT; in English, the Office for Country Information and Language Analysis, or OCILA) that carries out these analyses.
LADO reports are provided to governments in a number of ways: by their own regularly-employed linguists and/or freelance analysts; by independent academic experts; by commercial firms; or by a mixture of the above.
In Switzerland language analysis is carried out by LINGUA, a specialized unit of the Federal Office for Migration, which both employs linguists and retains independent experts from around the world.
When such analysts lack academic training in linguistics, it has been questioned whether they should be accorded the status of 'experts' by asylum tribunals, e.g. by Patrick (2012),[28] who refers to them instead as "non-expert native speakers (NENSs)".
In the UK, a 2010 Upper Tribunal (asylum) case known as 'RB',[38] supported by a 2012 Court of Appeal decision,[39] argue for giving considerable weight to LADO reports carried out by the methodology of native-speaker analyst plus supervising linguist.
[44] Following an item on the Dutch public radio programme Argos, member of parliament De Wit of the Socialist Party presented a number of questions to the State Secretary of the Ministry of Justice regarding the reliability of LADO.