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Traditionally, forensics has been defined as relating to the legal (civil or criminal) field, or a legal context setting. This association can be seen with other fields that contain the term “forensic” in their name, such as forensic sciences or forensic psychology. The self-definitions of such fields virtually always highlight their application within legal settings. For example, the stated aim of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences is to “advance science and its application to the legal system” (American Academy of Forensic Sciences, n.d.); the British Academy of Forensic Sciences defines forensic science as “the application of science to the law, both civil and criminal” (British Academy of Forensic Sciences, n.d.).

The question arises as to whether it is the data, the analysis, or the application that makes a linguistic analysis forensic. Much valid work considered to be forensic linguistics would not immediately fall under the legal association of “forensic”. Areas of work such as understanding the language of mis- or disinformation or influence and radicalization for defense and security purposes do not have such a clear and direct legal association, yet they may easily be considered forensic.

In dictionaries, the word casework is normally associated with social work involving an individual’s personal history or circumstances (e.g., OED third edition, 2014). In the context of forensic linguistics, analysts also apply their skills, experience, and knowledge to direct considerations of a particular personal situation. However, rather than relating to information on the personal circumstances of a specific individual or group, it instead relates to language data, created by individuals or groups, that is examined in investigatory situations.

The requirement for forensic linguistic expertise is one that arguably evolved from necessity. Early work in forensic linguistics was exceedingly casework driven. Investigators and lawyers were encountering the need to analyze language as evidence or challenge linguistic perceptions and interpretation, and it was clear that analysis grounded in linguistic theory had the potential to assist lawyers and judges in their work.

Svartvik’s The Evans Statements (1968) is often considered to be the first organized call for the creation of a forensic linguistic science, a field that undertook systematic analysis of language data in forensic settings. His monograph demonstrated how linguistics and casework-oriented linguistic analysis based on the study of observed data could contribute to an improvement in justice and how a better understanding of how language worked could help.

Other publications followed, revolving around how practitioners applied their linguistic knowledge in legal and courtroom setting. Articles and books such as Roger Shuy’s Language Crimes (1993), Coulthard’s A Failed Appeal (1997), and Lawrence M. Solan and Peter M. Tiersma’s Speaking of Crime (2005) were seminal works that introduced readers to evidential shortcomings and misconceptions related to language within the criminal justice system. Reviewing their own and other legal cases and the linguistic evidence relevant to their determination, these pioneering practitioners demonstrated how linguistic knowledge and approaches could be applied in new, varied, and (most importantly) useful ways to assist the legal system and improve the delivery of justice.

Although the academic field of linguistics was not formalized until the early 1970s, there is evidence of forms of linguistic analysis being used in forensic contexts from much earlier periods. The identification of perceived enemies on the basis of their language can be traced back to as early as the biblical story of Shibboleth:

And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay; Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand. (Judges 12:5–6)

Similarly, in World War II, Dutch border patrols sought to identity Germans pretending to be Dutch travelers by requiring them to say the city name Scheveningen. Dutch and German grammar have different phonetic rules for pronouncing the word-initial “s,” much less “s” + “ch,” which would make it largely unpronounceable to anyone except a native Dutch speaker. Although this is arguably forensic phonetics rather than forensic linguistics, it does demonstrate how deeply ingrained language analysis is in society. Today, the term shibboleth applies to any word that identifies a person as belonging (or not belonging) to a particular group.

Perhaps the earliest example of a type of forensic linguistics being proactively applied is to the Donation of Constantine, an eighth-century falsification of a fourth-century document. The papacy had claimed vast territories and spiritual and temporal powers on the basis of a grant by the Roman emperor, Constantine the Great. In 1440, the Italian philosopher and literary critic Lorenzo Valla applied his knowledge of Latin grammar and rhetoric to analyzing the Donation. Valla demonstrated that the document could not have originated in the fourth century as the Latin in it was inconsistent linguistically and stylistically with that of the period. Consensus now has the Donation to be an eighth-century ce creation, probably originating from within the papacy itself (Frontini et al., 2008).

In 1628, a similar analysis by the Calvinist theologian David Blondel concluded that the Decretals of Pseudo-Isidore, a collection of 500 years of letters and decrees providing the legal basis for papal independence and powers, was also falsified. Blondel demonstrated how the documents’ creator(s) lifted words, phrases, and entire sentences from documents allegedly authored hundreds of years later and strung them together to create the faked documents. Several red flags included phrases whose meanings in the later documents (from where they had been “borrowed”) had evolved to mean something else from that intended in earlier periods.

The understanding that it was possible to perform linguistic analysis and that it might be useful in forensic contexts eventually found its way into a number of fictional texts. In the short story “A Scandal in Bohemia” (Doyle, 1891), the famous detective Sherlock Holmes performs a form of authorship profiling on an anonymous note addressed to him. Holmes states that the author of the note must be German on the basis of grammatical constructions in the note and, in particular, the placement of part of the verb in the sentence: “This account of you we have from all quarters received” (Doyle, 1891, p. 63).

Holmes performs a basic contrastive analysis between various languages, concluding that “a Frenchman or Russian could not have written that. It is the German who is so uncourteous to his verbs” (Doyle, 1891, p. 63; see also Boucher & Perkins, 2020). The significance here is that, by Arthur Conan Doyle’s time, there was some inherent understanding that it was possible to identify an anonymous author’s native language from the way they used a second language.

In a much later suspense-crime novel, The Devil’s Teardrop (1999), its author Jeffery Deaver demonstrates the importance of understanding cross-linguistic influences on written language. His fictional forensic linguist and document examiner Parker Kincaid highlights that linguistic features contained in a threat letter did not correspond to patterns in a number of unrelated languages that one would expect from a genuine non-native English speaker. This led Kincaid to conclude that the author was only pretending to be foreign.

These imaginary scenes from crime fiction are precursors to many elements in current day authorship profiling, identifying sociolinguistic and dialectal features that allow analysts to make inferences regarding the linguistic persona authoring a text. We see real-life applications of authorship profiling approaches within this book in Chapter 3 on the Cyprus faked confession, in Chapter 4 on the Spanish fraudster Rodrigo Noguera Iglesias, Chapter 5 on the darkweb pedophile, and in the analysis in Chapter 9 of understanding ISIS communications.

Much has changed since those early attempts to explain how language worked or did not work in certain contexts. In the last 40 years, forensic linguistics has coalesced into an applied field of its own, taking knowledge from different areas of linguistics and applying it to forensic contexts such as language-based issues in the legal system.

Given that linguistic analysis encompasses every aspect of language, casework is very varied. Forensic linguistics extends beyond just linguistics and into multidisciplinary approaches, either through teamwork or by individuals with experience in other areas. Indeed, linguistic analysis has been applied to research and forensic contexts in areas such as psychology, as can be seen in Chapter 10 on the language of suicide.

Casework is also rarely as straightforward and conclusions never as certain—certainly never expressed in percentages as portrayed on television and films. This exaggeration of forensic linguistic analysis capability creates a CSI effect that real-life analysts cannot live up to. Chapters 4 and 8 demonstrate how client instructions and linguistic questions evolve as cases progress, especially when forensic linguists become involved at the outset or in the early part of an investigation. Features in the data may suggest to the analyst that a reformulation of the linguistic question is necessary; for example, what the client may believe is an authorship question may instead be a question of context falsification.