Forensic linguistics

Forensic linguistics applies linguistic analysis to legal questions, including interpreting legal language and assessing speech or writing as evidence.

Authorship attribution: The analysis of linguistic or stylistic features to assess who wrote a text. Forensic analysts compare a disputed text with known writing to evaluate its likely author.
Forensic phonetics: The analysis of speech sounds and voice characteristics for legal investigations. It provides acoustic methods for comparing recorded speech and examining disputed utterances.
Linguistic profiling: The inference of social characteristics from a person's language use. A profile may suggest community membership, but it is not the same as identifying a particular speaker.
Miranda rights: Warnings in United States law informing detained suspects of rights including silence and counsel. Linguistic analysis can examine whether a warning was understandable to the person receiving it.
Daubert standard: A United States legal test for whether expert scientific testimony is sufficiently reliable and relevant. It frames scrutiny of methods and claims offered by forensic linguists in federal courts.
Speaker identification: The use of speech characteristics to determine or compare a speaker's identity. Voice evidence can connect recordings to a person, though similarity alone does not establish identity.
Corpus linguistics: The study of language using systematically collected digital collections of texts or speech. Corpora provide comparison data for testing whether a disputed phrase or style is distinctive.
Plagiarism detection: The identification of unattributed copying or close textual reuse. Textual overlap can prompt a forensic question, but detecting copying alone does not establish legal authorship.
Court interpreting: The oral translation of communication during legal proceedings. Interpretation choices can change testimony, access to proceedings, and the record available to a court.
Forensic science error: Mistakes or misleading conclusions arising from forensic methods, interpretation, or testimony. It highlights why linguistic evidence needs validation, transparent limits, and careful courtroom presentation.

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