ABSTRACT
Forensic linguists provide expertise on a wide range of legal issues, including, for example, comprehensibility of written texts, trademark disputes, or speaker or author identification. Sociolinguists have become involved in forensic linguistics especially in situations where expertise on a person’s vernacular is of legal relevance or to interpret the meaning of utterances made in a language or variety other than the standard variety used in court. Where linguists are barred from making their own recordings or from using institutionally produced ones, they have turned to various alternative data sources. Sociolinguistic research on language and law can be divided into two broad categories depending on its goals, namely whether scholars are drawing on data from legal contexts to address broader sociolinguistic research questions or whether they are applying sociolinguistic theories and methodologies to address questions of legal significance. Sociolinguists may also rely on data collected through interviews or reading tasks.
