Peter L Patrick

Peter L Patrick is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Essex.

Peter was born in New York City and grew up in Jamaica WI. He received his PhD in Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania in 1992 for his thesis on linguistic variation in Jamaican Creole. He was Assistant Professor of Sociolinguistics at Georgetown University (1992-98) before coming to Essex, where he remains a member of the Dept of Language & Linguistics and the Human Rights Centre after his retirement in 2021. He conducted the first sociolinguistic survey of an urban English Creole in Kingston, Jamaica, published as 'Urban Jamaican Creole: Variation in the Mesolect' (John Benjamins 1999). He edited with John Holm the reference work 'Comparative Creole Syntax: Parallel Outlines of 18 Creole Grammars' (Battlebridge Publications, 2007), which systematically compares 18 Creole languages across 97 grammatical features. He was lead editor of "Language Analysis for the Determination of Origin: Current Perspectives and New Directions" (Springer, 2019) alongside Monika Schmid and Karin Zwaan.

His major areas of research interest include language variation and change, pidgin and creole studies, linguistic human rights, sociolinguistic methods, urban dialectology, and languages of the African diaspora. He has applied sociolinguistics to non-academic problems in the USA, UK and Jamaica through testimony in criminal cases, studies of clinical communication, and expert reports on the asylum process. He has also assisted in the development of Jamaican Language programmes in the UK Further Education sector. He has recently been working to challenge and refine the use of language as a tool for determining origins in asylum applications.

He was a founding member of the Language & National Origin Group which co-authored the 'Guidelines for the Use of Language Analysis in Relation to Questions of National Origin in Refugee Cases' (2004), now regularly cited in asylum cases around the world. He co-founded the Language and Asylum Research Group (LARG, www.essex.ac.uk/larg/) in 2010 to stimulate research and promote best-practice in Language Analysis for Determination of Origin (LADO). He has participated in or convened a dozen colloquia on LADO in Austria, Ireland, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, the US, and the UK, and given LADO seminars to linguists, lawyers, doctors, geneticists, immigration judges, and human rights practitioners. From 2008 to 2022 he has submitted expert linguistic reports to the UK Immigration and Asylum tribunals in over 100 appeals cases, and consulted as an expert linguist on cases before the Court of Appeals (England & Wales), the Inner House of the Court of Session (Scotland), and the UK Supreme Court.