Topic: Short Note On Forensic Linguistics

Shivi Forensics
Topic: Short Note On Forensic Linguistics

Written By 
Ahina Shree M R
Volunteer, Shivi Forensics
Introduction 
Forensic linguistics involves studying a language to identify people or parties involved in the criminal and civil cases in order to solve their problem without some parties being wrongly judged while others are wrongfully acquitted for crimes committed. Forensic linguistics is thus summarized as the use of language in court proceedings or legal issues either to present a case or get evidence from one party (Gibbons, 2). Language is mainly used to require information for solving crimes. So in 1968, Jan Svartvik the linguistics professor, introduced the term "forensic linguistics" for the criminal justice system. Forensic linguistics is used to analyse and understand the language written and spoken in criminal cases. To understand the different languages, linguistics uses several techniques, which includes among others, phonetics, morphology, and phonology. Forensic language involves the use of legal questions in order to get the important information needed. Forensic linguistics being qualified in the analysis of language, most of them possess other analytical skills such as mathematics, statistics, science and the law itself, which they have to deal with. Forensic linguistics is the interdisciplinary field which examines, defines, and investigates language in court as evidence for polices, judges, and lawyers. Some text types of forensic linguistics are emergency call, ransom demands and other threat communications, suicide letters, final death row statements, and confessions and denials by public figures. The possession of these analytical skills makes analysing and understanding both written and spoken language. 

Duty of Forensic Linguistics:
Forensic linguistics solves the crime by using different techniques. Forensic linguistics helps to make legal documents for criminal proceedings. Forensic linguistics helps the investigators to explain the report easily in the court. It helps the investigators to communicate easily in legal language in court proceedings. Forensic linguistics is also involved in questioned document cases to analyse the language, writing style and writing skill. Forensic linguistics also helps in law enforcement agencies to solve the dispute between whether it is spoken or written. By collecting the information, forensic linguistics can be able to understand the background of the person and also determine where he comes from. Forensic linguistics focuses on the meaning of the information and how the words and information are arranged. Forensic linguistics also analyse plagiarism. Plagiarism involves the collection and the comparison of different pieces of information in a bid to determine whether they were written by the same author. 

Application Of Forensic Linguistics:
• Forensic linguistics helps to determine the speaker identification bye victim and witness.
• It helps in the identification of social or regional accents and also helps in voice identification.
• Forensic linguistics determines the age of the person by listening to their voice.
• Forensic linguistics analyse the voice quality and speaking speed. 
• It identifies the author and also identifies the occasion of writing.
• Forensic linguistics makes legal documents for the criminal proceedings in the courtroom.

Phonetic linguistic - A part of forensic linguistics:
Nowadays days video and audio recording plays an important role in courtroom proceedings. For this purpose, forensic phonetics has emerged as a new field of importance. Phonetics is defined as the study of the sounds that people make as they pass information from one party to the other when speaking. Phoneticians analyse the sounds made through four aspects, which are: analysing the sounds made by the vocal cords out of the sound made from the recorded speech. Phonetic linguistic analyses various individual speech characteristics, such as the speaker's pronunciation of the speaker's consonants or whether the speaker slurs or lisps certain words.

Branches Of Forensic Linguistics:
Auditory Phonetics – It is the study of language sounds based on what is heard and interpreted by the human listener.
Acoustic Phonetics – It is the study of the physical characteristics of speech sounds as they leave their source (the speaker), move into the air, and gradually dissipate.
Semantics – It is the study of meaning as expressed by words, phrases, sentences, or texts.
Discourse and Pragmatics – It is the study of unity of language larger than the sentence.
Stylistics and Questioned Authorship – The main focus of this is author identification of questioned writings.

Cases Involving Forensic Linguistics:
Forensic linguistics involves cases like authorship identification, analysis of plagiarism, word meaning detection, trademark analyses, bribery, extortion, solicitation, determination of contract disputes, insurance, fraud, jury instructions, non-English language cases, perjury, copyright infringement, plain language, and also makes legal language.

Conclusion:
Forensic linguistics helps in various fields for criminal proceedings. It uses different techniques and methods for the analyses purposes. It contributes into solving crimes in different ways. It helps to detect, determine and identify the voice speed, speaking quality, speaking skills, speaking condition and also analyse written and spoken recordings. Different branches of forensic linguistics help in the criminal justice system. Phonetic linguistic is also major part in the forensic linguistics.

Reference:
Gibbons, John. Forensic linguistics: An introduction to language in the justice system.2003. Willey- Blackwell. New York.
IvyPanda. (2019) ‘Forensic Linguistics: An Introduction to Language in the Justice System’. 31 July. (Accessed: 10 March 2023).
Heydon, G., 2019. Researching forensic linguistics: Approaches and applications. Routledge.

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