The Strange and Fascinating World of Forensic Linguistics

Forensic linguistics deals with the study of language used in legal cases. Not lawyer talk, but things like figuring out who wrote something when they aren't identified. I've been delving into that type of puzzle just today, in reading about Trota of Salerno and which medical texts she did and didn't write, and Luke, who wrote two books of the Bible. So I was surprised to see a video about the science of these investigations. 

FBI forensic linguists learned an awful lot about the Unabomber by the manifesto he released. It didn't contain any identifying information, but it was so long that his writing style was a treasure trove of clues. Most communications from unknown perpetrators are much shorter, but there are techniques that police can use to trace them back to a suspect. Half as Interesting shows us some of those techniques that have cracked cases before just from some anonymous writing. This video has one minute of advertising at the end.


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