Forensic Linguistics

This is an exciting new area of linguistics, allowing lawyers and police officers to use linguistics as evidence. Language is incredibly important while deciding fair prosecution and can be used in many different ways.

1)      Forensic stylists

This is generally used to prosecute people for plagiarism.  With today’s communication technology, plagiarism is a very common crime and has a range of different levels of criminality. Plagiarism is usually detected using computer software (seen on the 12^th of August – ‘computational linguistics’). Now, the statistics given by computer programmes and linguists can present their evidence to show how many words are the same and whether with the same order/ syntax.

2)      Language and communication analysis

There are many communication centres, such as GCHQ, scattered over the entire world. Although there are strict rules about intercepting conversations in the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979, it is legal for some organisations to track and record them. Many linguists are employed to translate and write transcripts of verbal conversations of others. This gives them the opportunity to predict and catch any illegal acts all over the world.

3)      Forensic phonetics

If the same person’s speech is monitored on a few separate occasions – linguists are able to decipher more than just the apparent meaning. We can also make links between language chosen by looking at the social and regional background of the speaker.

These techniques are essential for finding justice. There are many famous examples where these procedures were very important, such as in the prosecution of David Hodgson. Another example was in 2005 Simmerson murdered his girlfriend and afterwards he sent text messages from her phone. He pretended to be Turner as he texted her daughter to convince her that she was well and he texted his own phone to give himself an alibi. Investigators linked patterns in orthographies and punctuation to letters he had sent previously with the text messages. This was significant evidence and he was found guilty. Linguistics has been used in many similar situations and it is interesting to see the importance of language. It will also be intriguing to see how forensic linguistics develops in the future.