conducted in either the asylum seeker's native language through an interpreter, or in an international lingua franca like English.[17] Australia uses the former method, while Germany employs the latter; the Netherlands uses either method depending on the languages involved.[17] Tape recordings of the interview then undergo language analysis, which can be done by either private contractors or within a department of the government. In this analysis, linguistic features of the asylum seeker are used by analysts to make a determination about the speaker's nationality. The reported findings of the linguistic analysis can play a critical role in the government's decision on the refugee status of the asylum seeker.[17]Description and prescriptionMain articles: Descriptive linguistics, Linguistic prescriptionLinguistics is descriptive; linguists describe and explain features of language without making subjective judgments on whether a particular feature is "right" or "wrong". This is analogous to practice in other sciences: a zoologist studies the animal kingdom without making subjective judgments on whether a particular animal is better or worse than another.Prescription, on the other hand, is an attempt to promote particular linguistic usages over others, often favouring a particular dialect or "acrolect". This may have the aim of establishing alinguistic standard, which can aid communication over large geographical areas. It may also, however, be an attempt by speakers of one language or dialect to exert influence over speakers of other languages or dialects (see Linguistic imperialism). An extreme version of prescriptivism can be found among censors, who attempt to eradicate words and structures which they consider to be destructive to society.Speech and writingMost contemporary linguists work under the assumption that spoken (or signed) language is more fundamental than written language. This is because:Speech appears to be universal to all human beings capable of producing and hearing it, while there have been many cultures and speech communities that lack written communication;Speech evolved before human beings invented writing;People learn to speak and process spoken languages more easily and much earlier than writing;Linguists nonetheless agree that the study of written language can be worthwhile and valuable. For research that relies on corpus linguistics and computational linguistics, written language is often much more convenient for processing large amounts of linguistic data. Large corpora of spoken language are difficult to create and hard to find, and are typicallytranscribed and written. Additionally, linguists have turned to text-based discourse occurring in various formats of computer-mediated communication as a viable site for linguistic inquiry.The study of writing systems themselves is in any case considered a branch of linguistics.HistoryMain article: History of linguisticsSome of the earliest linguistic activities can be recalled from Iron Age India with the analysis of Sanskrit. The Pratishakhyas (from ca. the 8th century BC) constitute as it were a proto-linguistic ad hoc collection of observations about mutations to a given corpus particular to a given Vedic school. Systematic study of these texts gives rise to the Vedanga discipline ofVyakarana, the earliest surviving account of which is the work of Panini (c. 520 460 BC), who, however, looks back on what are probably several generations of grammarians, whose opinions he occasionally refers to.