NEW EXPERIENCE IN UNIVERSITY CURRICULUM: FORENSIC LANGUAGE EXPERTISE

National defense and security agendas, which often arise during times of crisis, tend to focus the goals of language study on narrow subjects. The master’s degree program “Forensic language expertise” offered by Southern Ural State University (Russian Federation) for bachelors of Linguistics, Philology, Law, and Psychology concerns the analysis of written and spoken language for legal purposes: principles and methods of linguistics are applied to the language of legal proceedings and documents. The program is designed to form the skills that allow students to work as experts providing a wide spectrum of expertise: speech analysis (meaning analysis), stylistic analysis, phonoscopic expertise, authorship identification, handwriting and forensic language expertise. The program “Forensic language expertise” includes theory and practice of Forensic Linguistics, the following specialist-area disciplines: theory of language, modern Russian language, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, stylistics and literary editing, fundamentals of NLP (natural language processing), fundamentals of forensic language expertise, techniques of analyzing the written speech, audio and sound record phonoscopic expertise, authorship identification, and handwriting expertise. Practical courses are taught by leading experts in the field. Students learn how to use a multi-dimensional approach that incorporates traditional principles of language analysis and those of sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and forensic language expertise as well as special software and instruments for expertise (SIS II Sound Editor, AIPlugins, EdiTracker, Sound Cleaner modules, etc.).