Let’s learn forensic linguistics

Forensic linguistics is one of the more fascinating topics in language research. Knowledge and skill in this field can be used to fight crime and solve mysteries. We’ve gathered a bunch of research and resources to help you become an expert in the field.

But first, let’s start with some terms and definitions.

Terms & Definitions

Forensic linguistics is the study of language in legal contexts. It applies linguistic analysis to solve crimes, determine authorship, and resolve legal disputes. This field uses language patterns, writing styles, and speech characteristics to provide insights and evidence in legal proceedings.

Stylistics is a branch of applied linguistics, and also falls under forensic linguistics. It encompasses the analysis of language use, including vocabulary choices, sentence structures, rhetorical devices, and discourse patterns, to uncover underlying meanings and communicative strategies. Stylistics plays a crucial role in examining written and spoken texts to identify authorship, detect deception, analyze witness testimonies, and understand the socio-cultural influences on language. It also helps us uncover how language is crafted, manipulated, and interpreted.

Stylometry, on the other hand, is a branch of computational linguistics. It employs statistical and computational techniques to analyze patterns and characteristics within written texts. By examining factors such as word frequencies, sentence structures, vocabulary richness, and syntactic features, stylometry aims to uncover unique stylistic signatures that can be used for authorship attribution, author profiling, plagiarism detection, and text classification.

Getting started

We recommend starting with learning how and why language shapes thought. Researcher Lera Boroditsky has some groundbreaking work on the topic, which we also discuss in our blogpost, English is Crazy #2 [History of Grammatical Gender]. Once you have a basic understanding of this concept, you can move on to learning how to analyze language in order to determine intention, authorship, and more.

Here’s what we’ve collected for you:

  1. Articles
  2. Books
  3. Spotify
  4. Tools
  5. YouTube

Articles

  • 🌟Our curated collection of articles on forensic linguistics.
  • 🌟Our curated collection of articles specifically on stylistics.

Books

Spotify

  1. En Clair, a podcast about forensic linguistics, literary detection, language mysteries, and more. If you like true crime, mystery, and learning through storytelling, this is for you!
  2. Solving Crime with Forensic Linguistics, an episode of the BBC Word of Mouth series, featuring Dr. John Olsson and Michael Rosen. Produced by Beth O’Dea.

Tools

  • Lingualyzer, A computational linguistic tool for multilingual and multidimensional text analysis. Make sure to first read the research behind it, so you understand what it is and how to use it.
  • 🆕 Occurrence of Words, a tool that analyzes text for occurrence of any word.
  • 🆕 Phrases in Common, a tool that analyzes texts in search of shared phrases.
  • 🆕 Words in Common, a tool that analyzes the number of words in common as well as their instances between two texts.

YouTube

  1. How language shapes the way we think | Lera Boroditsky | TED
  2. Forensic Linguistics, Prof. Handke, The Virtual Linguistics Campus
  3. Rob Leonard – The Groundbreaking Science of Forensic Linguistics
  4. Forensic Linguistics: Using Language Analysis to Solve Crimes with the FBI, this is another one with Dr. Robert Leonard, Hofstra University
  5. Forensic Linguistic Profiling & What Your Language Reveals About You, Harry Bradford, TEDxStoke
  6. Forensic linguistic techniques for authorship identification, ghostwriting and plagiarism detection, Olumide Popoola, European Network for Academic Integrity
  7. CWIT 2021 – Authorship Attribution with Stylometry, C.R. Johnson, University of Wisconsin