ABSTRACT
With the spread of technology across the globe and into every aspect of day-to-day life, language data have become more available than ever before. Ordinary people are leaving thick trails of text and talk across the internet, and as a result, there has been a vast increase in the capacity for courts to call on language data as evidence. Moreover, research in criminology and legal studies has also begun to tap into the vast resources of language data to describe patterns of offending, including technology-facilitated offending, victimisation and crime prevention and to assemble corpora of case files for legal analysis. There is therefore an increasing need for linguists to provide expertise in legal cases involving text or talk, and for evidence-based research to support criminologists and other scholars working in cognate fields. This sets out the environment within which forensic linguistic research takes place and explains the key factors influencing good practice in the study of language and the law such as strong linguistic training, data sources, ethical conduct and foundational education in language as a system.
