Forensic Linguistics
- Musleh Saadi
- Aug 25
- 3 min read
Updated: Aug 26
Forensic Linguistics is the use of linguistic theory and methods in legal and criminal cases, capturing the connection between language, crime, and law (Coulthard & Johnson, 2017). It approaches both written and spoken texts as evidence—going from contracts, wills, threatening letters, and ransom notes to courtroom evidence, police interviews, and calls for help. It thus becomes a science that is applied in order to prevent language from being abused or wrongly interpreted in the justice system. For example, a contested will may be examined to determine whether the wording portrays the testator's own style or was manipulated. Basically, it is a relationship between language(Linguistics) and Forensic Science.
The field was professionally established in 1968, when Jan Svartvik critically reviewed the Timothy Evans case, revealing coerced police statements that incorrectly led to his conviction. Global developments followed since then. Linguistic investigation of cases such as the Birmingham Six in the UK brought the unnatural "police register" in witnesses' statements into focus. In the US, Roger Shuy investigated Miranda rights, challenging whether suspects had been fully informed about them, and whether confessions were obtained through coercion. In Australia, researchers examined the disadvantage of Aboriginal speakers in "white English"-ruled courts. The above examples demonstrate how forensic linguistics has also been employed in the past to counter injustice and safeguard marginalized groups (Olsson, 2008).
Variation and Authorship
One of the pivotal ideas in forensic linguistics is textual variation, which assists in authorship and credibility identification. Variation might result from register considerations—field (topic), tenor (relationship), and mode (medium)—or from non-register considerations such as aging, neurological difference, or performance stress. For instance, the same individual might write an informal email with jargon and a very formal job application letter. In the same vein, threatening letters or ransom notes can include author disguise, whereby authors deliberately shift their voice. Bakhtin's concept of heteroglossia describes how our speech is always tainted by various voices we have been exposed to, making attribution more complex (Bakhtin, 1981). Forensic linguists hence consider intra-author and inter-author differences in their investigations.
One of the key concepts of forensic linguistics is textual variation, which is utilized when authors consciously alter their style. Bakhtin's theory of heteroglossia describes the way our words are always infused by many voices we have experienced, making attribution difficult (Bakhtin, 1981). Forensic linguists balance intra-author and inter-author variation in their work.
The courtroom is a discourse battleground where power is exerted through language. Turn-taking, topic choice, and questioning are controlled by lawyers, generating asymmetry between professional legal actors and non-professional lay witnesses. Courtroom discourse takes two main modes:
Narrative Discourse – lawyers build alternative stories (e.g., the prosecution version of guilt vs. the defense counter-story of innocence).
Question–Answer Discourse – particularly during cross-examination, attorneys use closed questions, double negatives, and face-threatening acts (Brown & Levinson, 1987) to manage witnesses.
For instance, rather than questioning "What happened?" an attorney can insist with "Isn't it true that you were at the crime scene at 10 p.m.?" These tactics betray the fact that trials are not neutral truth-finding enterprises but constructed linguistic performances.
The Role of the Forensic Linguist
The forensic linguist serves as an expert witness to ensure fairness in the justice system. Their tasks include authorship attribution of disputed texts, assessing whether confessions were coerced, and clarifying ambiguous contractual language. They also highlight power asymmetries, particularly for vulnerable groups such as children, second-language speakers, or trauma survivors. By analyzing how language is framed, manipulated, and interpreted, forensic linguists safeguard the principle of justice. As Coulthard et al. (2017) note, forensic linguistics demonstrates that law itself is inseparable from the language through which it operates.
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