Forensic linguistics

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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.

Forensic linguistics is an umbrella term covering many applications to legal contexts. These are often split between written and spoken items. It is common for forensic linguistics to refer only to written text, whereas anything involving samples of speech is known as forensic speech science.

There are principally three areas of application for linguists working on written texts in forensic contexts:^[1]

• understanding language of the written law,
• understanding language use in forensic and judicial processes, and
• the provision of linguistic evidence.

Forensic speech science also has many different applications:^[2]

• speaker comparison
• disputed utterance analysis
• voice parades
• speaker profiling
• audio enhancement and authentication

The discipline of forensic linguistics is not homogeneous; it involves a range of experts and researchers in different areas of the field.