Anyone done a masters in Forensic Linguistics?

[WotchaGuv]

Posting for traffic (also not quite sure where else this would capture posters who might be able to answer!)

I’m looking at an Msc in Forensic Linguistics (with a speech science component) and hoping to hear from anyone who has taken a similar course and can offer frank insight.

Really interested in hearing about career prospects/opportunities and transferable skills gained with this or similar courses.

Any thoughts, feedback or personal experiences much appreciated!

I considered this briefly and concluded that this is such a new area in the UK that there aren't that many work opportunities. But that was a few years ago.
You could contact the CIOL and see if they'll post the question to their members (my old professional body used to do this sometimes).
It's a fascinating subject and if I had the resources I'd be tempted to do the course myself just for the fun of it...

I know absolutely nothing but that sounds fascinating. You should post in Pedants' Corner, a lot of posters who know about language post there and some of them have linguistics degrees and the likes. You might get lucky.

I know of someone who studied this and works in something intelligence related.

It's not that new actually! I was considering studying this in 2009/10... but didn't because of the lack of career prospects. So it hasn't changed much.

OP, it's the sort of degree that most people do out of pure interest in the subject. You'll get a masters degree and you'll get good analytical and writing skills.

But if you don't get one of the 1-2 jobs that are available at the time you graduate (if you're lucky), or become a lecturer in the subject, no other employers will really know what you're talking about when you say Forensic Linguistics.

That doesn't mean it's not worth having a Masters for the transferrable skills, but it isn't all that directly relevant to a lot of things.

It's also something that is likely at very high risk of being replaced by AI.

Thanks, I hadn’t thought of the CIOL!

I also looked into it a few years ago (maybe 8?!) and had the same reservations.

I think working directly as a ‘Forensic Linguist’ is likely only a route open to academics or at the very least those with a PhD.

The full degree title is Forensic Linguistics and Speech Science (Msc) and there is also a corpus linguistics component and the opportunity to develop skills in quantitative data analysis.

I’m wondering what applications there might be in industry (e.g. language technology) for the speech science element. I’m also interested in what applications there might be to do with authorship, cybersecurity, (and again language technology and testing), etc.

I’ve also been looking at Data Analysis roles and wondering if the transferable data science skills would open up opportunities in this area.

Thanks, I will try this!

Ooh that’s a good pointer. The department who offers this have lots of links with security, intelligence and cybersecurity organisations, and do talk about these sorts of opportunities on their website. Just difficult to know how many of these sorts of roles are available and how specialised they are (and if they are civil service roles, if they pay well, what the opportunities for progression are).

Do you mind if I pop you a message over?

GCHQ have good careers pages so it's probably worth having a look there, and at the MI5 website too. I'm sure they'd both love the analysis aspects of your course. In fact why don't you go on Civil Service Jobs and get a daily digest of jobs in cyber security, analysis (or whatever) and see what comes up.

Sorry, I have PMs switched off and I also don’t have any more info to share! I went to a talk by some people working in an intelligence unit connected to my work and one had this masters, I’m afraid that’s all the info I have to share, best of luck!

Gotcha, thanks for the insight – I won’t message you, promise! 😁

Thanks for your reply! Yes, I was looking at the MA a few years back around 2016, and had some doubts about career prospects related to the course.

I’m pretty sure stuff like expert testimony requires a PhD and is probably not full time work even for academics. I wouldn’t expect to get a job as a ‘Forensic Linguist’.

As this one is an MSc and also involves Speech Science, it seems a bit more promising in terms of transferable skills and potential applications in industry.

It’s also something that is likely at very high risk of being replaced by AI.

Do you have any more insight on this?

I’ve actually been doing some research recently into fake news and something that is interesting is that although there are NLP detection tools, they are trained on fact checked news and so work on correlations – true news tends to appear in different formats and platforms to fake news, so the models assess these types of format differently.

There does seem to be a role for linguistics in determining authorship, authenticity, (incl stuff like bots, deepfakes, fake reviews, disinformation in public discourse, etc.) and complementing or informing some of the applications for AI.

Funnily enough, I have also been looking at MSc masters courses in Computational Linguistics (this was my starting point and FL came up as a bit of a wildcard) and trying to understand better how the two areas intersect.

@WotchaGuv Computational linguistics will give you more options if you are thinking about career applications.

If you're just interested from an academic perspective and want a general masters degree, forensic linguistics will be interesting and will give you lots of transferrable skills. It's just unlikely to have a huge amount of direct relevance to jobs you are likely to get, because there aren't a huge number of them out there.

Um, this thread might be enlightening and also possibly off-putting - it's about the intersection of Forensic Linguistics and MN's feminist wing.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/site_stuff/5057903-mumsnet-corpus?reply=135384754

I think I remember this! I wouldn’t hold Forensic Linguistics as a discipline accountable, although seems like this researcher might have taken more care where they were getting their dataset from (to put it one way). I’m very into privacy (I report websites with dodgy cookie policies directly to the ICO, every time 😆), so def wouldn’t be nicking people’s content off websites.

You might want to look at the National Crime Agency - they may have a use for that kind of thing, particularly in cyber crime, phishing scheme etc.

Thanks!