Wordsmiths' Blog

The interviewer:  

Our correspondent, Joëlle Vuille, Ph.D., holder of a law degree and a doctorate in criminology, is assistant professor of law at the University of Fribourg. Joëlle lives in the Geneva region.

The interviewee:


John Olsson, Ph.D., professor emeritus of the University of Bangor, Wales, a distinguished world specialist in forensic linguistics, and author of several books, including "Word Crime. Solving Crime Through Forensic Linguistics". Professor Olsson kindly agreed to respond questions that Professor Vuille put to him. We thank them both for shedding light on a linguistic field that is not well known.

JV: How did you become interested in forensic linguistics?

JO: I first became interested in authorship at about the age of 22 while studying literature, but it remained a dormant interest for a long time. In between I had studied psychology and became interested in behaviour, and had studied Skinner and Watson, but felt that behaviourism did not have any of the answers. I found behaviourist theories of language very weak and was interested to read Noam Chomsky’s somewhat damning rebuttal of what Skinner had to say about language. In the early 1990s I decided to study linguistics and took an MA at Bangor University. I got to hear about work being carried out at Birmingham University under Professor Malcolm Coulthard on fabricated confessions and did a postgraduate dissertation on that topic, and later a PhD in forensic authorship methods, which I actually took at Glamorgan University where they were developing a new section in the forensic sciences.

JV:  How do forensic linguistics work, in a nutshell?

JO: Forensic linguistics is really an umbrella term for a number of related disciplines, all to do with language and the law. Some people are interested in legal language and how ordinary people interact with that. I just examined a PhD dissertation from a student in the Caribbean who was interested in the disconnect between lawyers’ language and the language of the lay client. It was fascinating to see, once again, how the real difficulty was not so much that this was legal language which people were grappling with, but poor communication skills on the part of the professionals. You have to take the view that if a client cannot understand what a lawyer is saying then it is the lawyer’s fault. The client can absolutely not be blamed for that: the problem is, it can be very costly for the average person. One interesting example was the word ‘deed’ as it applies to land. In this particular case the client was an elderly, very religious lady who interpreted the word ‘deed’ in a biblical sense, as an act, a religious act, and the lawyer – I’m afraid they do not teach lawyers literature or Latin any more – did not pick up that this was the sense in which the client understood ‘deed’. The lady had a dispute with her husband about property, and she was thinking that ‘deed’ had something to do with the act of separating from her husband, and how a ‘deed’ would deliver the land to her in a religious sense. For twenty minutes the lawyer and the client simply spoke at cross purposes to each other. This goes beyond legal language, or the language of the law: it is really to do with ignorance and arrogance on the part of lawyers who talk down to their clients. The really successful lawyers know how to talk to non-legal people. They understand that the difference between their own perspective and the perspective of the client is not purely linguistic, or even cultural, but, rather, depends on an understanding of how the law works. You only get that if you train and work as a lawyer. The problem is that some lawyers seem to forget that the average person they speak to is not going to understand legal principles without a little help.

What linguists can do in relation to this type of problem is to show lawyers how to communicate better with their clients. It is really a communication problem as much as a legal language problem. Unfortunately, most forensic linguists have little or no knowledge of the law. In Europe and America, there are perhaps no more than half a dozen linguists with legal qualifications.

Having said all of that, I have come across some lawyers who are wonderful communicators, both inside and outside of the court room. They are the really successful ones, the top QCs who are doing murder trials and major fraud cases.

JV: Tell us about a case where forensic linguistics had an important impact on the investigation or prosecution of a suspect.

JO: My own specialty is authorship, although I do sometimes get asked to do things like interpreting gang language or even to break codes. A couple of years ago a young man was in Manchester prison charged with attempted murder. He wrote a letter to his girlfriend and told her that on the back of the page were a bunch of numbers but she was to disregard those. In the UK, it may be the same in other countries, the prison authorities censor outgoing mail and they passed this letter to the police. It ended up on my desk and at first I could not make sense of it. It was very short, about 80 words. There weren’t even 26 different symbols, and of the symbols turned out to be punctuation marks, and indeed some of the punctuation marks turned out to be symbols. It was a motley thing. After playing around with it for a while I remembered one of the officers telling me that the writer was extremely polite, courteous, considerate and so on, suspiciously so. I idly wondered if the word ‘please’ might appear in his text and so I looked for strings of six letters or characters and began to play with those. Eventually, I found one that looked promising and broke the code from there. It turned out that our young man was telling his girlfriend to take a big bag of cash around to the victim’s house and try to bribe him into not giving evidence. I must say, it was a very generous offer, but fortunately it never reached its intended recipient. Even if it had he probably would have felt safer with the shooter behind bars. So, in fact, he got a much more severe sentence than he would have, because he was attempting to pervert the course of justice, as well as having tried to kill someone.

Mostly, however, I do authorship cases. It isn’t always the major murder cases which prove the most important. Sometimes it is good to know that through work you have done you have actually helped to turn someone’s life around. I recently did work in an harassment case, and I am sure that if the writer in that case had not been found, he would have simply continued to make his victim’s life a complete misery.

JV: How reliable are forensic linguistics? Do courts usually admit evidence based on forensic linguistics?

JO: In the UK, authorship has a good track record in the courts. I think between my colleagues and myself we have probably collectively given evidence well in excess of a hundred times. I’ve given evidence on about 70 or 80 occasions, in a wide variety of courts, from magistrates’ courts to the Court of Appeal, and several foreign courts, sometimes in person, sometimes via video link.