Mystery Writer's Guide to Forensic Science - Forensic Linguistics

The field of forensic linguistics has been growing in prominence in the past couple of decades.   I've had an interest in this field and want to examine it in relation to writing.

So what is it?

Criminal Cases

Forensic linguists are involved in many areas that relate to crime, both solving crime and absolving people wrongly accused of committing crimes. Some of these areas of research and expertise include:

* voice identification (for instance, determining whether the voice on a threatening tape recording was that of the defendant; sometimes also called forensic phonetics)

* author identification (determining who wrote a particular text by comparing it to known writing samples of a suspect; sometimes also called forensic stylistics)

* discourse analysis (analyzing the structure of a writing or spoken utterance, often coverly recorded, to help determine issues such as who is introducing topics or whether a suspect is agreeing to engage in a criminal conspiracy)

* linguistic proficiency (did a suspect understand the Miranda warning or police caution?)

* dialectology (determining which dialect of a language a person speaks, usually to show that a defendant has a different dialect from that on an incriminating tape recording. As opposed to voice identification, which analyzes the acoustic qualities of the voice, dialectology uses linguistic features to accomplish similar goals)

Forensic linguistics is an interesting and growing specialty, especially in the UK. I'm going to be discussing this subject over the next few weeks and how writers can use this field to help solve crimes in their novels.

Source: Peter Tiersma, What is Forensic Linguistics?, http://www.languageandlaw.org/FORENSIC.HTM
Picture source: BBC NEWS