The Words We Believe | A Forensic Linguist on What Your Words Give Away | Prof. Tim Grant

Your English leaks your first language, your region, your education and sometimes your job. A forensic linguist can read it back. Professor Tim Grant of Aston University explains how, and where the limits are. In this first of three conversations on forensic linguistics, we cover: 00:00 Why written words do not settle anything 07:05 What one text message reveals about its author: sociolinguistic profiling 09:00 Telling a Colombian from a Mexican by their English 10:50 Do you become a different person in a different language? 16:50 Why “we agreed” in a contract means something else all the time 22:30 Why certainty grows faster than evidence, and how experts fight their own bias 26:55 Ghostwriting: who is the author of a CEO’s speech? 30:30 The USD 50 billion Yukos arbitration and the question that made no sense 34:00 How Tim stops a client’s hopes from steering what he sees 45:50 AI drafts it, you edit it, someone signs it: who wrote it? 52:30 AI minutes, AI reports and the chief constable who lost his job 56:30 “I can cause good things to happen to you”: how a promise becomes a threat 58:35 Audience question: confirmation bias in linguistic evidence Tim Grant is Professor of Forensic Linguistics at Aston University, Birmingham, and was founding director of the Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics (2019 to 2024). His casework includes investigations into sexual assault, stalking, murder and terrorism, as well as civil disputes. He co-authored Language and Online Identities (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and wrote The Idea of Progress in Forensic Authorship Analysis (2022), free to download from Cambridge University Press. He co-hosts the Writing Wrongs podcast. Next in the series, Thursday 22 October: The Threat in Your Ear, with Tim Grant and James Tompkinson of the University of York. What happens to a spoken threat between the moment it is said and the moment it is heard? I host these conversations in a personal capacity because I want to understand how things work, so I go to the people who do the work. #ForensicLinguistics #Linguistics #Language #AuthorshipAnalysis #Evidence #Law #AI #Writing #Communication #Leadership