forensic linguistics, literary detection & language mysteries
En Clair is a new podcast about forensic linguistics by forensic corpus linguist Claire Hardaker. From the About page:
What does that mean? Well, rather aptly, given this podcast’s focus on crime and intrigue, the word corpus comes from Latin, and roughly translates to body, or more accurately in this case, to a large collection. A corpus linguist, then, is someone who looks at large linguistic datasets, usually in the millions or billions of words.
A forensic linguist, meanwhile, specialises in language, crime, and the law. This can include hate-speech, plagiarism, disputed authorship, terrorist manifestos, forged suicide notes, death threats, forced confessions, contractual ambiguities, and far more besides.
When you combine a corpus linguist and a forensic linguist, you get forensic corpus linguist who looks at a large criminal or legal linguistic datasets. For example, this might be a million tweets of online abuse. It could be five text messages sent by a murderer from a victim’s phone, pretending to be that victim versus a thousand actually sent be the victim. It could be a book supposedly written by a US president, but in reality ghost-written by someone else. And so on.
What is en clair about?
En clair is a casebook of forensic linguistic cases, literary detection, and language mysteries. It also looks at codes, cryptography, undeciphered languages, and linguistic myths and legends. Each episode presents a case of linguistic intrigue or controversy from ancient history to the present day.
As you can imagine, plenty of the episodes deal with crime. In some cases the subject is relatively anodyne – few people are likely to be distressed by the fine details of a Hollywood plagiarism battle. However, there are plenty of cases that feature different kinds of assault, several that involve murder, and a handful that are even darker.
Go to the website for more info and to subscribe on most of the usual podcast apps.
