Forensic linguistics applies linguistic analysis to legal contexts. It examines language evidence in investigations, trials, and legal procedures. There are three main areas of application: understanding written law, language use in legal processes, and providing linguistic evidence. Forensic linguists analyze both written documents and spoken language to determine authorship, detect plagiarism, and help solve crimes. Their analyses consider syntax, style, spelling, punctuation, and other linguistic features.

1. Forensic Linguistics
By-
Prof.R.R.Borse,
Asst.Prof.,
Eng.Dept.,
B.P.Arts,S.M.A.Sci.,K.K.C.Com.College,Chalisgaon
ravindraborse1@gmail.com

5. Wikipedia:-
Forensic linguistics, legal linguistics, or
language and the law, is the application of
linguistic knowledge, methods and
insights to the forensic context of law,
language, crime investigation, trial, and
judicial procedure. It is a branch of applied
linguistics.

12. There are principally three areas of
application for linguists working in forensic
contexts:
1. understanding language of the written
law,
2. understanding language use in forensic
and judicial processes, and
3. the provision of linguistic evidence.

15. One of the main goals of Forensic Linguistics is to provide
a careful and systemic analysis of language.
The results of this analysis can be used by many
different professionals.
For example, police officers can use this evidence
not only to interview witnesses and suspects more
effectively but also to solve crimes more reliably.
Lawyers, judges and jury members can use these
analyses to help evaluate questions of guilt and
innocence more fairly.
And translators and interpreters can use this
research to communicate with greater accuracy.
Forensic Linguistics serves justice and helps people
to find the truth when a crime has been committed.

16. The following video shows how Forensic Linguistics
can be used by law enforcement to help them identify
suspects and bring criminals to justice:
• https://youtu.be/acHg0L5ky30

18. The Birth of Forensic Linguistics
Jan Svartick analyzed the statements given by Timothy
John Evans. It was in regard to re-analyzing the
statements given to police at Notting Hill police station,
England, in 1949 in the case of an alleged murder by
Evans.
Evans was suspected of murdering his wife and baby and
was tried and hanged for the crime.
Yet, when Svartick studied the statements allegedly given
by Evans, he found that there were different stylistic
markers involved, and Evans did not actually give the
statements to the police officers as had been stated at
the trial.

20. Moving to the US and the beginnings of the field of
forensic linguistics, the field really began with the 1963
case of Ernesto Miranda. His case led to the creation of
the Miranda Rights and pushed the focus of forensic
linguistics on witness questioning rather than police
statements. Various cases came about that challenged
whether or not suspects truly understood what their
rights meant – leading to a distinction of coercive versus
voluntary interrogations.

22. The fact that someone has been arrested does not necessarily mean
that he or she is guilty; and even when a suspected person did commit a crime,
the police are still bound by law to make sure that the laws of the country are
respected and protected.
To help ensure that these regulations and procedures are always
respected, police are required in many countries to read out formal text.
In the United States, this text is called the “Miranda Warnings”.
Forensic Linguists who specialize in the analysis of “Miranda Rights” can show
how variations in how the text is read can alter the way it is understood. They
might also investigate how translations of the text might change the original
legal intention.

23. “Miranda Rights”
• https://youtu.be/Z-VW8Ldw6YI

24. In the United Kingdom, the legal defense for many
criminal cases questioned the authenticity of
police statements.
At the time, customary police procedure for taking
suspects' statements dictated that it be in a
specific format, rather than in the suspect's own
words.
Statements by witnesses are very seldom made in
a coherent or orderly fashion, with speculation
and backtracking done out loud. The delivery is
often too fast-paced, causing important details to
be left out.

25. Forensic linguistics can be traced back as early as
1927 to a ransom note in Corning, New York. As
the Associated Press reported in "Think Corning
Girl Wrote Ransom Note" "Duncan McLure, of
Johnson City uncle of the (kidnapped) girl, is the
only member of the family to spell his name
'McLure' instead of 'McClure.'
The letter he received, supposedly from the
kidnappers, was addressed to him by the proper
name, indicating that the writer was familiar with
the difference in spelling."

28. Means…
That includes the study of text types and forms of
analysis. Any text or item of spoken language can
potentially be a forensic text when it is used in a
legal or criminal context.
This includes analyzing the linguistics of
documents as diverse as Acts of Parliament (or
other law-making body), private wills, court
judgments and summonses and the statutes of
other bodies, such as States and government
departments.

31. It examines language as it is used in cross-
examination, evidence presentation, judge's
direction, police cautions, police testimonies in
court, summing up to a jury, interview
techniques, the questioning process in court
and in other areas such as police interviews.

32. Means…
Police officers use specific language to elicit (get)
certain responses from civilians. Because of a
police officers' social stature, and the way they
often phrase "requests" as "commands", people
may be confused as to what their rights are when
they are being questioned by police. Officers use
linguistic tactics including putting the blame onto
the victim and asking questions with ambiguous
phrasing to elicit specific responses from people.

36. Forensic Linguistics is commonly divided into two major areas -
Written language: for example, the language used in
regional, national, and international law, today and in the past;
transcripts of police interviews with witnesses and suspects;
criminal messages used in cases of terrorist threat, suicide,
kidnapping, blackmailing, etc.; the translation of legal documents
from one language into another; the examination of text material
to answer questions about who may or may not have been the
author. The written language examined by a Forensic Linguists
can be in many different forms: phone messages, notes,
handwritten letters, posting in social media, etc.
Spoken language: the language used by interpreters during
official interviews of witnesses, suspects, and victims; the
language used by offenders or victims during a crime. The focus
of this area is not simply what was said, but how it was said.

37. Linguists who primarily investigate written language look
at features such as spelling, sentence construction,
word-choice, and punctuation, etc.
By comparison, linguists who principally examine
spoken language focus on accent, dialect, pronunciation,
tone of voice, speed and rhythm of speech, etc.
As the name implies, most experts working within
Forensic Linguistics have a degree in linguistics, the study
of language. However, a great many of Forensic Linguists
also have a degree or advanced training in other
academic fields such as Law, Psychology, Sociology,
Computational Sciences and Criminology.

38. Emergency /Hoax/Fake call:-
In an emergency call, the recipient or emergency operator's ability to extract
primarily linguistic information in threatening situations and to come up with the
required response in a timely manner is crucial to the successful completion of
the call. Emphasis on intonation, voice pitch and the extent to which there is
cooperation between the caller and the recipient at any one time are also very
important in analyzing an emergency call.
To check if the caller might be making a false or hoax call. A genuine call has
distinctive interlocking and slight overlap of turns.
If the caller uses a rising pitch at the end of every turn, it might represent
a lack of commitment;
the recipient's use of a rising pitch indicates doubt or desire for
clarification.
The call ideally moves from nil knowledge on the part of the recipient to
a maximum amount of knowledge in a minimum possible period of time.

39. Ransom demands or other threat communication:-
Threat is a counterpart of a promise and is an important feature in a ransom
demand. Ransom demands are also examined to identify between genuine and false threats.
An example of a ransom note analysis can be seen in the case of the Lindbergh
kidnapping, where the first ransom note (sometimes referred to as the Nursery Note) stated:
"We warn you for making anyding public or for notify the Polise the child is in gut care" (sic).
From the sentence, the kidnapper makes the claim that the child is in good hands
but to make such a claim, the note would have to be written before the perpetrator enters
the premises. Therefore, the claim is false (at the time of writing) since the kidnapper had
not even encountered the child when he wrote the note.
Kidnappers may write statements that later end up being true, such as "your child
is being held in a private location" being written ahead of time.
The style of writing used in ransom notes are examined by forensic linguists in
order to determine the writing's true intent, as well as determining who wrote the note.
Forensic linguists look at factors such as syntactic structures, stylistic patterns, punctuation
and even spelling while analyzing ransom notes.
In the case of the Lindbergh ransom note forensic linguists compared similarities of
writing styles from the note to that of writing of the suspect, creating a better chance at
discovering who wrote the note.

40. Suicide letters:-
A suicide note is typically brief, concise and highly
propositional with a degree of evasiveness. A credible (real)
suicide letter must be making a definite unequivocal
proposition in a situational context. The proposition of
genuine suicide is thematic, directed to the addressee (or
addressees) and relevant to the relationship between them.
Suicide notes generally have sentences alluding to
the act of killing oneself, or the method of suicide that was
undertaken.
The contents of a suicide note could be intended to
make the addressee suffer or feel guilt. Genuine suicide
letters are short, typically less than 300 words in length.

41. Social media:-
Social media statements are often context specific,
and their interpretation can be highly subjective.
Forensic application of a selection of stylistic
techniques in a simulated authorship attribution case
involving texts has been done in relation to
Facebook,whats app, etc.
Analysis of social media postings can reveal
whether they are illegal (e.g. sex trade,anti-
social,casteist) or unethical (e.g. intended to harm) or
whether they are not (e.g. simply provocative or free
speech).

44. Use of linguistic evidence in legal proceedings:-
Linguists have provided evidence in:-
1. Trademark and other intellectual property disputes
2. Disputes of meaning and use
3. Author identification (determining who wrote an anonymous
text by making comparisons to known writing samples of a
suspect; such as threat letters, mobile phone texts or emails)
4. Forensic stylistics (identifying cases of plagiarism)
5. Voice identification, also known as forensic phonetics, used to
determine, through acoustic qualities, if the voice on a tape
recorder is that of the defendant)
6. Discourse analysis (the analysis of the structure of written or
spoken utterance to determine who is introducing topics or
whether a suspect is agreeing to engage in criminal conspiracy)
7. Language analysis (forensic dialectology) tracing the linguistic
history of asylum seekers (Language Analysis for the
Determination of Origin)
8. Reconstruction of mobile phone text conversations

46. Use of linguistic evidence in legal proceedings-
The following areas of application have different degrees of reliability within the
field. Linguists have provided evidence in
1. Author identification - The identification of whether a given individual said or
wrote something relies on analysis of their idiolect, or particular patterns of
language use (vocabulary, collocations, pronunciation, spelling, grammar).
2. Forensic stylistics- This discipline subjects written or spoken materials (or
both) to scientific analysis for determination and measurement of content,
meaning, speaker identification, or determination of authorship, in identifying
plagiarism.
3. Discourse analysis- Discourse analysis deals with analyzing written, oral, or
sign language use, or any significant semiotic event.
4. Linguistic dialectology- This refers to the study of dialects in a
methodological manner based on anthropological information. It is
becoming more important to conduct systematic studies of dialects, especially
within the English language.

47. 5. Forensic phonetics- The forensic phonetician deals with the
production of accurate transcriptions of what was being said.
Transcriptions can reveal information about a speaker's social
and regional background. Forensic phonetics can determine
similarities between the speakers of two or more separate
recordings (John Olsson, 2007).
6. Forensic transcription -The two main types of transcriptions are
written documents and video and audio records. Accurate, reliable
text transcription is important because the text is the data which
becomes the available evidence.
7. Variation -Intra-author variations are the ways in which one
author's texts differ from each other. Inter-author variations are
the ways in which different authors' writing varies. Two texts by
one author do not necessarily vary less than texts by two different
authors.