In my thesis, I hypothesize that forensic linguistic techniques of linguistic demographic profiling can be honed into a method of native language analysis that is supported by quantified language transference data. My previous post explains how I set out to develop Native Language Analysis (NLA) as just such a method, and I strongly suggest you read it first. To summarize, I am essentially expanding on the established techniques of author profiling by incorporating quantified language data to connect interlanguage transference features to the native languages that likely inspired them.





As promised, this post is based on the sections of my thesis where I test my hypothetical method by using it to analyze the language evidence from real forensic linguistic cases. One of the languages I catalogued data for was Arabic. The evidence I analyzed comes from the case of Daniel Pearl's abduction.

Text of Email 1

Daniel Pearl was a journalist for The Wall Street Journal on assignment in Pakistan when he was lured into an abduction in Karachi on January 23, 2002. In the days following, Pearl’s kidnappers sent two emails to several newspaper editors, editorials, and publishers. Pearl was executed by his abductors on February 2, a few days after the second email was delivered.



The parties responsible for kidnapping and murdering Pearl were eventually identified and arrested. They were Pakistani operatives of Al-Qaeda and native speakers of Arabic. The text of the two emails were extracted from an evidence corpus of approximately 303 words. This evidence corpus is examined using the prototype Arabic transference catalog and the NLA methods of my thesis.



A total of 19 error types were identified and tagged. The table below describes the 12 most frequent error types identified within the evidence corpus. Like the NLA feature catalog, the errors are organized according to frequency of occurrence. were extracted from published transcriptions and compriseThis evidence corpus is examined using the prototype Arabic transference catalog and the NLA methods of my thesis.