Locating People with Their Language: An Applied Linguistics Course Using Linguistic Microvariation Databases and Tools

Abstract

Recent years have seen an increase in the online availability of dialect corpora, databases and search, analysis and visualization tools (cf. www.dialectsyntax.org). Although primarily intended for linguistic research, this infrastructure provides rich resources for courses on sociolinguistics, dialectology, formal linguistics and linguistic methodology. This chapter demonstrates the usefulness of the Dutch linguistic microvariation research tool MIMORE (www.meertens.knaw.nl/mimore) for a course in applied linguistics, more specifically on Language Analysis for the Determination of Origin (LADO). LADO is used in asylum procedures as a means to determine whether an asylum seeker originates from the country or area that s/he claims to originate from. It is a task of linguists to make clear if and how LADO can be a valid method, and what kind of linguistic expertise is needed. MIMORE contains three databases with (morpho-)syntactic and (morpho-)phonological data from a large number of locations in the Dutch language area. The chapter describes how the MIMORE data and tools have been used in the course as training material, to introduce students to the different levels of language variation, to teach them how to recognize linguistic differences and make these explicit and to show them the complications involved in using linguistic properties to locate speakers.