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In the early 2000s, Belgium, Germany, Holland, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia began implementing a screening technique for asylum seekers and undocumented migrants called ‘Language Analysis for the Determination of Origin’ (LADO) This attempts to determine if the accent of an undocumented migrant corroborates their claim of national identity For example, the authorities aim to determine – based on accent alone – whether a Somali is from Mogadishu (a legitimate place from which to claim asylum) or in fact from northern Somalia (considered a safe place to live and thus to be deported back to) The tender to carry out these tests was mostly won by two private Swedish companies, Sprakab and Verified These companies conducted phone interviews with asylum applicants in the target countries, using Sweden’s largely unemployed former refugee population as a resource of informants to listen in on calls and conduct interviews These informants’ non-scientific assertions on where they thought people ‘really’ came from were then reworked by linguists, who bolstered the claims with international phonetic symbols and turned them into forensic reports for use in court in the target countries   When academic linguists throughout the world were alerted to this flawed screening process, they began to contest its ideology of monolingualism Linguists insisted that the voice is not a bureaucratic document, but rather a biography, and an index of everyone you have ever spoken to The itinerant lives of refugees meant that their voices in particular should not be used as a national identifier They argued that while the informants conducting the interviews may speak the same language as the applicant, they frequently were not from the same place This could affect the dialogue and the quality of the data After hundreds of wrongful deportations, governments finally began to listen to these campaigning linguists Yet rather than scrap LADO, they insidiously incorporated the critiques, deciding that since dialogue was rendering the tests unscientific, they would use monologues instead Now, rather than soliciting speech in an interview, asylum seekers were expected to simply speak for fifteen minutes non-stop They were free to say