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Forensic linguistics, legal linguistics, or language and the law is the application of linguistic knowledge, methods, and insights to the forensic context of law, language, crime investigation, trial, and judicial procedure. It is a branch of applied linguistics.
Forensic linguistics is an umbrella term covering many applications to legal contexts. These are often split between written and spoken items. It is common for forensic linguistics to refer only to written text, whereas anything involving samples of speech is known as forensic speech science.
There are principally three areas of application for linguists working on written texts in forensic contexts:[1]
Forensic speech science also has many different applications:[2]
The discipline of forensic linguistics is not homogeneous; it involves a range of experts and researchers in different areas of the field.