Electronic crimes from a forensic linguistic point of view

Abstract

Cybercrime relies heavily on textual communication; in fact, “most forms of online abuse occur textually”, The growth and popularity of electronic and social media means that there are now many new opportunities for collecting evidence or data, benefiting both investigators and forensic linguists Forensic linguists work with emerging technologies from cases involving text messages to more recent cases involving tweets and forum posts. It would be impossible to cover all the areas in which forensic linguistics can contribute to the investigation of cybercrime; this is partly because both fields are constantly evolving

The majority of existing forensic linguistic work concerns three general categories: written legal language (e.g. analysing how instructions are interpreted and understood), spoken legal language (e.g. analysing force in interviews), or investigative linguistics and evidence-gathering Some crimes are inherently linguistic in that they are carried out through language, for example: threats, blackmail and bribery. These are described as “language crimes”.