Resources for Forensic Linguistics

Forensic linguistics is a branch of linguistics that is concerned with (mostly) criminal investigations and the use of linguistic analysis in this process. For example, a very simple task of a forensic linguist could be to analyse the linguistic content of a threat message and try to find out the writer of this text. A linguist who is trained in text analysis and stylistics will find themselves equipped with such tools that would be helpful in this analysis. Today, corpus linguistics is heavily used in text analysis for forensic linguistics. Moreover, forensic linguistics is not just about investigating threat messages or suicide notes, there are many more opportunities with the new mediums of communication on the internet, e.g. the analysis of social media texts for deception, fake news, disinformation, and trolling.

I have come to know some people and resources in last few years in this area. Following them on social media (Twitter) will be helpful for the reader to widen their horizons and/or get more information about forensic linguistic methods.

• Dr Claire Hardaker (she also runs a podcast on forensic linguistics which is very informative, and she is the director of FORGE: Forensic Linguistics RG, University of Lancaster).
• William Dance is doing PhD in online fake news.
• Isobelle Clarke is a corpus linguist who has worked on Trump's tweets.
• Maciej Eder is a stylistician and digital humanist. He has written an R package called Stylo which is helpful in text analysis, e.g. authorship attribution.

As far as books related to forensic linguistics are concerned, a simple Google search with 'forensic linguistics' can return many titles including introductory books and handbooks about forensic linguistics. PDFs for many books can be found on Library Genesis (search on Google or use DuckDuckGo Search Engine that is a bit more merciful in searching such websites).

Forensic Linguistics in Pakistan

Forensic Linguistics is the sub field of Linguistics which is used to identify criminals, gangsters and solve legal cases as well. In foreign countries it considers as a vital part of investigation. Linguists are serving in this field as a phonetician, stylistician, and discourse analyst and so on. That’s why the legal institution is very much responsible and efficient, that the crime rate of that countries is very low.

Now, if we look at Pakistan’s condition, why crime is getting its root deeper and deeper in Pakistan? Gangsters, underworld etc. because Pakistan has not a fully fledge system of investigation.

I personally think that forensic linguistics should be in Pakistan with its full sense. At this time, not even a single university offering forensic linguistics as a subject or its specialization. If it would be in Pakistani Universities it can help students or professionals in near future. It also would help our legal field specially for finding criminals out (which is very unusual in our country).

A forensic Linguist can be:

Phonetician, Stylisitican, discourse analyst, semanticist etc. These things are also very much important in our legal way of investigation rather “3rd degree”.

So in my point of view it would be a dual process like the competence of students would be improved as well as it would help our country to sustain the anti-criminal cell. May be a little hard effort in this field can serve a lot.

Ahh! But our bad luck is this that we do not have a single subject on it. Students like me who love forensic field in any discipline would be very happy… InshahAllah I will try my level best to introduce forensic linguistic in Pakistan as a subject. Because I know that efforts & struggles make dreams come true. This field would serve a lot at national level & may be Criminals get civilized 

Anyway, my dream is to be a forensic linguist inshahAllah.