International Association of Forensic Linguists


The International Association of Forensic Linguists is a professional organization consisting primarily of linguists working in fields related to the area of language and law, or forensic linguistics. Areas of expertise include authorship attribution, disputed confessions, trademark issues, legal language, etc. In addition to linguists, the association has members from other professions related to language and the law, particularly members of the legal profession.
Currently, the president of the IAFL is Janet Cotterill, and the vice-president is Ronald Butters.
The IAFL holds biennial international conferences and edits the International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law, a peer-reviewed journal that publishes articles on any aspect of forensic language, speech and audio analysis. The board of editors includes language experts; Ronald Butters, Diana Eades, Paul Foulkes and Peter French.

Controversy

In 2008, lawyers hired by the one-man company Nemesysco threatened with legal actions unless the article "Charlatanry in forensic speech science", published in International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law in 2007, was withdrawn. The publisher Equinox decided to withdraw the article from the online version of the magazine, and offered the company to publish a letter in the journal, an offer they never took. In the article, a commercial product sold by the company was criticized as based on pseudo-science, and the company was not given the chance to comment before the article was published. The withdrawal resulted in criticism of the publisher for not understanding how to manage a scientific journal. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences branded the company's behavior a "serious assault on research freedom".

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