ABSTRACT
In recent years, linguists (and in particular phoneticians) have been greatly in demand to assist in crime detection. Maurice Varney discusses the reasons for the increasing importance of forensic linguistics (as this branch of the science is called) and points out a few of the difficulties sometimes encountered. In the original article, Varney discussed three branches, namely handwriting; phonetics and phonology; discourse analysis, but in this extract we have selected only the second of these.
