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Sierra Adams is a senior at Southern Oregon University, where she studies English literature.

Authorship analysis is a branch of forensic linguistics that can be used to solve court cases as well as identify authors like JK Rowling and (possibly) Shakespeare. The term forensic linguistics was coined in 1968 by Jan Svartvik (Olsson). Forensic linguistics is a relatively new topic that has been used in some high-profile murder cases such as the 1996 case of Ted Kaczynski and more recently Chris Coleman in 2009. Authorship identification is an exciting new form of research that is used to identify authors based on linguistic analyses and computer programs. It can be useful outside of the courtroom as well. Recently, linguists have worked with computer programmers to develop software that can detect authorship, with a high-accuracy rating, within minutes. Because of the growing interest in forensic linguistics and specifically authorship identification some literary scholars have taken this opportunity to bring up the old argument of Shakespeare’s writing. Authorship identification techniques serve useful and interesting in all forms of written investigation.

Interest in linguistic authorship analyses can be traced back to the early 1700s, according to John Olsson, with some discussion over biblical passages in 1711 and Shakespeare studies in 1785. One of the first methods of forensic linguistics involved statistics and was invented by Augustus Morgan, an English mathematics professor, in 1851. However, it was not until the 1940s that authorship analyses using statistics and linguistic cues became a serious study (Olsson 12). With the new invention of powerful computers that could analyze statistics in the 1980s, computational linguistics arose and with it, more ways to analyze a text.

Tim Grant, a professor of forensic linguistics, writes that the study of authorship “attracts researchers and practitioners from a variety of disciplines including those working in linguistics, literature, history, theology, psychology, statistics, and computer science” (Grant 215). These researchers look for a variety of things when trying to understand or detect authorship. How the text was produced (medium, method, materials) is used to establish a basis of the work, especially if it was hand-written. The most important factor in authorship analysis is style (i.e. the use of pronouns or grammar cues such as semicolons, too many commas). Other telling features of writing include: tone, sentence structure, faux oversimplification or up-reaching (trying to sound uneducated vs trying to sound pedantic), and descriptions of people, places, emotions, or situations. Forensic linguists also dip into psycholinguistic profiling which means they try to determine the psychological background of the suspect and answer the question, ‘what kind of person wrote this?’ Lastly, they take a look at the texts relationship to comparison texts (Grant). These techniques allow for forensic linguists to scientifically organize and analyze data from personal writing and speaking.

One of the first high-profile court cases involving forensic linguistics was the case of Ted Kaczynski, or the Unabomber, who published a “rambling thirty-five-thousand-word declaration of the perpetrator’s philosophy” (Hitt). As the investigation progressed with little traceable evidence, the FBI turned to linguistics. They contacted a retired FBI agent and forensic linguist, James Fitzgerald, who used authorship analysis to determine who wrote the Unabomber’s Manifesto and,

By analyzing syntax, word choice, and other linguistic patterns, Fitzgerald narrowed down the range of possible authors and finally linked the manifesto to the writings of Ted Kaczynski, a reclusive former mathematician. Both Kaczynski and the Unabomber also showed a preference for dozens of unusual words and expressions…as well as the less familiar version of the cliché “You can’t eat your cake and have it too.” A judge ruled that the linguistic evidence was strong enough to prompt him to issue a search warrant for Kaczynski’s cabin in Montana; what was found there put him in prison for life. (Hitt)

This fascinating case brought a lot of recognition and interest to the field of forensic linguistics and authorship analysis. It also set the precedent for bringing linguists into the court to help sway the jury.

In 2009, Chris Coleman’s family was murdered after receiving several threatening “ransom notes” asking for money as well as emails threatening both Coleman’s family and his boss’s. No physical evidence connected him to the crime yet something about his story didn’t add up. Coleman was working as a security officer for a televised evangelical Christian company and was also having an affair. Beyond this, many of his wife’s friends testified against him in court. Forensic linguist Robert Leonard analyzed the ransom notes and Cole’s emails, journals, and notes and deduced that he was the killer himself, and even though “Leonard’s testimony was disputed in the courtroom…in a case with no physical evidence firmly linking Coleman to the crime, Leonard’s words—and Coleman’s—took on added weight.” (Hitt). This case, along with Kaczynski’s, put forensic linguistics in the courtroom and led to various classes and degree programs around the country (Butters) as well as made way for authorship analysis to be taken seriously as a form of investigation.

The tools of forensic linguistics and authorship analysis can be used in non-criminal cases as well, “today, computers can do this type of analysis in seconds, whether to uncover a case of murder-disguised-as-suicide, study an anonymous medieval poem, resolve disputes about authorial credit, or even provide political asylum for a refugee” (Juola). Patrick Juola developed a computer program that can detect authorship with over 90 percent accuracy. In 2013 J.K. Rowling published The Cuckoo’s Calling under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. Juola’s software analyzed the novel and compared it to her other work. The software matched it within minutes. Juola writes,

Over the past decade, I have developed a computer program to do this sort of analysis of writing style, based on literally millions of different features. This program will take a sample of writing and determine, on the basis of similarity, who among a set of authors was most likely to have written that sample. (Olsson)

His computer program replaces hours of comparison work and helps build up linguistic evidence. An actual linguist would most likely have to double-check the work and be able to explain the differences and why they are significant. Even so, this is still an exciting development in the field of forensic linguistics. Not all, however, appreciate the results of computational authorship analyses.

Literary authorship analysis has been an area of interest since the 1700s and the question of Shakespeare’s authorship began around 1785 when “Reverend James Wilmot wrote that Sir Francis Bacon was the real author of the Shakespeare plays” (Olsson 11) and since then the Shakespeare Controversy has been fiercely debated. Over the years, curious fans of the famous plays have attempted to credit “Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, the 5^th Earl of Rutland, the 6^th Earl of Derby, and the 17^th Earl of Oxford” (Dobson). The most convincing and/or popular competitor though, seems to be Christopher Marlowe who was a respected contemporary of William Shakespeare and who has a cult-like following that is just as passionate, if not as large, as the Bard himself. Organizations such as Shakespearean Authorship Trust are very active in the debate and even hold annual conferences to provide platforms for discussion. The founder of the organization runs a website called “Doubt About Will dot org” and signs his welcome letter, “Yours in doubt, Mark Rylance, Trustee of the Shakespearean Authorship Trust” (Rylance). In 2016 the Shakespeare Controversy made headlines after “The New Oxford Shakespeare edition of the playwright’s works — which will be published by Oxford University Press online ahead of a worldwide print release — lists Christopher Marlowe as Shakespeare’s co-author on the three “Henry VI” plays, parts 1, 2 and 3” (Shea). This shocking news was reported by the BBC, The New York Times, and The Washington Post among others. The Post reports that in order “to find out if collaboration occurred, 23 international scholars performed text analysis by scanning through Marlowe’s (and other contemporary writers’) works, creating computerized data sets of the words and phrases he would repeat, along with how he did so — all of the idiosyncrasies that comprise one’s writing” (Andrews). They found enough of Marlowe’s presence in the texts to credit him with co-authorship. Most Shakespearean scholars are not pleased with this controversy and have made themselves very clear on who is responsible for the Bard’s famous plays.

A particular favorite retort of mine comes from the 2008 edition of The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare. This whopping 5.2 pound, 541 page encyclopedia is edited by Michael Dobson and Stanley Wells who are decidedly Stratfordians, or, pro-Shakespeare. Those who question the authorship of his plays are called anti-Stratfordians. In a biting entry under authorship controversy Dobson writes, “many commentators have paid reluctant tribute to the sheer determination and ingenuity which these anti-Stratfordian writers have displayed” (31) and later he goes on to write, “this Authorship Controversy, consciously or not, is very largely about class” (31) and since many of the anti-Stratfordians reside in the United States, Dobson claims that the USA is “a country whose citizens apparently find it easier to entertain romantic fantasies about their unacknowledged talents than do the British themselves” (31). Even though it was a little outdated it was definitely the most passionate and straightforward published response that I could find.

So, after reading this passage from 2008 and then discovering that the publishers at the very same Oxford University Press went ahead and included a co-authorship a mere eight years later, I had to find out how the editors of the encyclopedia responded. It turns out that the second edition of The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare was published in January of 2016 just before the computational authorship analytics that c-credited Marlowe were confirmed and published. In early November of 2016, the Oxford University Press released a statement by Gabriel Egan saying, “the news is that he collaborated as a writer much more than we used to think he did. We can now say with a high degree of certainty that upward of third of his plays were co-written in some sense or other” (Egan). As to how this was confirmed:

The new machine-based approach – Computational Stylistics – has started to reveal some very startling facts. For example, it is now clear that Shakespeare’s vocabulary – the total body of all the different words he knew – was not exceptionally large (as has long been assumed) but rather was just typical for the period. We now know that a lot of words and phrases that we used to think were coined by Shakespeare were already in use by other writers before him. Wherever his genius lay, it was not in his vocabulary, but in his ways of combining existing words and phrases. (Egan)

This piece seemed so defeated in tone that I began to feel genuinely sad for the self-proclaimed Stratfordians and their ardent belief in the singular-genius that was Shakespeare. I could not find any public responses from the original editors of the encyclopedia but I hope to one day read the updated entry on Authorship Controversy in the next edition. As far as Egan’s thoughts, ultimately he seemed to accept this unwelcome linguistic study by concluding, “we should apply this kind of scientific rigour as much to humanistic study as anything else, since no matter what their fields everyone who undertakes research for a living is ultimately in pursuit of the truth, and these are the best ways we have for finding it” (Egan). Regardless of co-authorship, Shakespeare is still a key figure in literature, history, and drama. The new techniques of authorship analysis may uncover even more shocking discoveries as it develops.

Authorship analysis, whether in the courtroom or in academics, remains a hot topic. This burgeoning branch of forensic linguistics will only get more valuable and more contested as time goes on. With most of us broadcasting our lives on social media, through texts, and online chatrooms, our writing can define us more than ever. How we present ourselves, what words we type, the pronouns we choose, and the slang we use, are all key pieces in creating our written and spoken identities. Now that forensic linguists can work with statistics and programmers to determine authorship from huge samples of personal writing, we will have to pay closer attention to what we are saying.

Works Cited

Andrews, Travis. “Big debate about Shakespeare finally settled by big data: Marlowe gets his due”, The Washington Post, October 25 2016.

Butters, Ronald. “Forensic Linguistics.” Journal of English Linguistics. Sage Publications, 2011.

Egan, Gabriel. “What did Shakespeare write?” Oxford University Press Online, November 8 2016.

Grant, Tim. “Approaching Questions in Forensic Authorship Analysis.” Dimensions of Forensic Linguistics, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2008.

Hitt, Jack. “Words on Trial; Can Linguists Solve Crimes that Stump the Police?” The New Yorker, July 25 2012.

Juola, Patrick. “How a Computer Program Helped Show J.K. Rowling write A Cuckoo’s Calling”, The Scientific American, 2013.

Marche, Stephan. “Wouldn’t It Be Cool If Shakespeare Wasn’t Shakespeare?” The New York Times, October 21, 2011.

Olsson, John. Forensic Linguistics. Continuum, 2004.

Rylance, Mark. The Shakespearean Authorship Trust, 2018. http://www.shakespeareanauthorshiptrust.org.uk/

Shea, Christopher. “New Oxford Shakespeare Edition Credits Christopher Marlowe as a Co-author” The New York Times, October 24 2016.

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Brian Wood is an English major and skiing addict studying at SOU. His two great loves are prose and powder.

Anyone who has found themselves on a ski lift listening to their neighbor describe how they^[1] “sent it off a gnar cornie, pulled a triple-cork, just missed the death cookies, and stomped the landing with steeze” probably understands that skiers and snowboarders possess a unique lingo largely unintelligible to outsiders. As in many sports, technical terms and esoteric descriptions pepper the speech of snow sports enthusiasts, transforming their casual banter into a language sometimes barely recognizable as English. However, the linguistics of skiing and snowboarding differ from the majority of sports dialects in two key points.

First, while most American sports’ lingos consist primarily of English terms coined to more precisely describe sport-specific actions, skiing/snowboarding speech embodies an amalgamation of English, Norwegian, and German terminology. To master ski/snowboard jargon—and indeed, to comprehend almost any conversation on or about a ski slope—one must understand expressions derived from all three of these languages, as well as some French, Russian, and Finish additions. Second, the language of skiing and snowboarding departs from more uniform sports’ vernaculars in the cultural rift splitting the dialect. The counter-culture, punk- and gangster-influenced lingo of snowboarders—and recently, some young freestyle skiers—exists in overt rebellion to the ordered, establishmentarian speech characteristic of skiing. This ongoing cultural power-struggle, in addition to the dialect’s diverse linguistic roots, gives the lingo of skiing and snowboarding a depth, nuance, and complexity unparalleled by more single-faceted sports.

Just as the sport of skiing traces its earliest roots to stone paintings in Norway, Herbert R. Liedke recognizes in his paper “The Evolution of the Ski-Lingo in America” that, “Norwegian has contributed the fundamental ski terms to the American ski language” (Liedke 116). Likewise, in his essay “The Language of Skiers,” Horst Jarka affirms, “The first [skiing] terms to be found in dictionaries are, like the word ski itself, of Scandinavian origin: Christiania (long since Anglicized to Christie, -y), ski joring, skiöjoring, slalom, and telemark” (Jarka 202). Despite Norway’s responsibility for the existence of skiing lingo, however, American English speakers initially resisted the adaptation of Norwegian terms into their skiing lexicon.

Throughout the 1800s, Americans preferred to clumsily lump skis in with the English ‘snowshoes’ rather than accept the more precise Norwegian term (Liedke 117). Additionally, some American skiers, such as those in California’s Sierras in the 1860s and ‘70s, invented their own terms for the sport. Sierra skiers devised “such picturesque word creations for skis as: flip-flops, or wooden-wings or, simpler, snow-gliders and wooden sticks” (Liedke 117). These coinages, while commendable in their ingenuity, failed to make a lasting impact on ski lingo. Even after skiing’s popularity exploded going into the nineteenth century, spurring a burst of corporate attempts to articulate the sport to potential customers, the search for English ski terminology still yielded unsatisfying results. Exclusively English ski lingo proved clumsy and inefficient at best, misleading at worst: “an awkward and unskilled mode of describing skiing” (Liedke 117).

By the early 1900s, American skiers and ski marketers had begun to recognize the need to blend English ski expressions with the more accurate and elegant alternatives offered by European languages. Motivated by linguistic necessity, the excellence of German skiers and ski technology, and a growing number of ‘jet set’ American families with a taste for extravagant European ski vacations, English ski vocabulary began to give way to an influx of European—particularly German—terminology. Jarka asserts, “the German element in the language of skiers soon outweighed that of any other foreign language…used not only by American theoreticians and instructors but also by ski fans who want to show how much they are ‘in the know’ on the art of skiing.” He lists a variety of German words incorporated into English ski vocabulary, including ‘fallinie,’ ‘vorläufer,’ ‘girlande,’ ‘riesenslalom,’ ‘schneepflug,’ and ‘treppenschritt,’ which evolved into the English adaptations ‘fall line,’ ‘forerunner,’ ‘garland,’ ‘giant slalom,’ ‘snowplow,’ and ‘stair step’ (Jarka 202-203). These terms, Jarka explains, are literal translations of the German, or loan translations, as he refers to them. Other German words, such as ‘mogul’—a term for bumps caused by heavy skiing on a particular slope—interlaced with English ski lingo without any change at all.

With the adoption of extensive German terminology into skiers’ jargon, the skiing lingo began to develop into a unique mode of speech, a language distinct from Norwegian, German, and English. In addition to loan translation and verbatim usage of German, Norwegian, or French words, the sport produced words exclusive to the world of skiing. Jarka references ‘skiable,’ ‘skimanship,’ and ‘skithievery’ as examples of skiing lingo’s departure from any single language, and points out, “skiers have added new meanings to words like bathtub, bunny, doughnut, eggbeater, snowplow, T-bar, and tow, and coined new terms like dope slope and slope fashions” (Jarka 204). Additionally, Liedke demonstrates skiing lingo’s burgeoning unintelligibility to non-skiers of any language or nation, quoting a ski reporter from the New York Times as proclaiming, “Such expressions as ‘geländesprungs, schusses, slalom, tailwagging and langlaufing’ are heard and you realize that, in addition to learning how to ski, you must learn to speak a strange language” (Liedke 120). As both Jarka and Liedke recognized, the language of skiing had outgrown the constraints of a single place or national identity, evolving into an entity tied exclusively to the experience, the mountain, and the exhilaration of hurtling downhill over snow.

Mirroring the journey of ski lingo into linguistic distinction and legitimacy, skiing also developed a unique culture: one stepped in affluence, prestige, and exclusivity. In stark difference from the sport’s Norwegian genesis as a practical and universally-accessible means of transportation, skiing in the 1900s on catered almost entirely to the upper classes, and the language of skiing expressed this elitism. The practical impossibility of skiing on a budget, coupled with the insidious classism prevalent in ‘ski biz’ advertising, cultivated a strong “snob appeal of…skier’s language” (Jarka 203). Skier speech became a privileged dialect, a syntactical assertion of wealth and cultural capital, and skiers utilized the complexity and multi-lingual nature of their lingo as a barrier to outsiders of lower class or economic means.

Even for those accepted into the prestigious inner circle of skiing lingo, slope speech tended toward a strong focus on order, adapting driving and traffic terminology to stifle freedom of expression or recklessness in skiing. While many of these terms inevitably stemmed from necessity as the skyrocketing popularity of skiing led to increasingly crowded slopes, some phrases—such as the epithets utilized to chastise and demonize reckless or aggressive skiers—demonstrated a clear dedication to structure, principle, and restraint on the mountain. Jarka demonstrates the antipathy faced by skiers who resisted the order imposed on their sport, listing various punitive labels imposed on high-speed skiers: ‘schussboomers,’ ‘hot rod skiers,’ and ‘trail hogs’ (Jarka 204). Additionally, he references an article which, in its title, posits the question “Can Schussboomers be stopped?” As do the derogatory terms of most cultures and languages, these labels for reckless skiers demonstrate the values of skiing lingo through the language’s choice of opponent. By vilifying those (usually younger) skiers eager to push the boundaries of the sport, the skiing language of the 1900s embodied a foundation of support for social and linguistic establishment—a support that grew so pervasive as to invite almost inevitable rebellion.

The revolution against skiing’s establishment culture emerged with the introduction of snowboarding: a sport which, while not significantly different from skiing in a technical sense (skiers slide down snow on two planks, snowboarders on one), embodied skiing’s collective cultural Id. While skiing society supported social values of order structured to maintain the status que, snowboarding championed individual expression, unapologetic pursuit of adrenaline, and strong counter-culture ideologies. In her article “What Is So Punk About Snowboarding?,” Rebecca Heino asserts, “snowboarding is aligned closely with surfing culture…Both blend the creativity of movement with the beauty of nature and the thrill of vertigo, a flirting with danger” (Heino 182). Heino continues, “Snowboarding represented a resistance to materialism and separation of mind and body, while embracing a wholistic view of nature that was similar to Zen and Buddhism” (Heino 183). This stark conflict in worldviews gave snowboarding the fuel to instigate a linguistic revolution.

In order to differentiate from mainstream ski culture, snowboarding lingo drew inspiration from other counter-culture movements. Heino explains, “Instead of the snowboarders aligning themselves with the dominant ski culture, they presented their cultural roots in surfing, skateboarding, and the ‘gangsta’” (Heino 178), and this cultural rift led “Snowboarders [to clash] with skiers in style of dress and body presentation, equipment, and language” (Heino 178). Perhaps the most fundamental linguistic divergence of snowboard culture from ski culture arises in the description of the sport itself. As Heino addresses, snowboarders did not ‘ski,’ but rather adopted the surfing term ‘shred’ into a mountain context (Heino 180). Heino elaborates, “Snowboarding appropriated other words from skateboarding and surfing such as goofy footed (riding with your right foot in front) and sick (excellent, as in ‘That was sick air’)” (Heino 181), resulting in a snowboarding lingo far more easily recognizable to the youth counter-culture of surf and skate groups than even the most linguistically well-versed mainstream skier.

In addition to surf and skate vocabulary, snowboarding also derived strong linguistic influence from gangster culture. As Holly Thorpe observes in her article “Embodied Boarders: Snowboarding, Status, and Style,” “The snowboarding media blatantly appropriate this gangster lingo, writing text in colloquial language and terminology that only gangsters and snowboarders understand” (Thorpe 189). Thorpe offers an example in Transworld Snowboarding, a popular snowboarding magazine and website which “writes to ‘all you fresh-ass mofos out there’” (Thorpe 189).

The incorporation of gangster lingo into the snowboarding lexicon differs from that of surf and skate culture, however, in that gangster terminology offers virtually no practical use in describing the act of snowboarding. Instead, snowboarders draw an exclusively stylistic and ideological connection between their sport and gangster culture, appropriating gangster terms to synonymize the snowboarding lifestyle with aggression, rebelliousness, and masculinity, despite the lack of physical or technological similarity. As Kristin L. Anderson affirms in her piece “Snowboarding: The Construction of Gender in an Emerging Sport,” snowboarding’s gangster speech is both a cultural statement and an intimidation tactic. Anderson argues, “Because the physical practice of snowboarding does not require obvious strength, violence, and aggression, snowboarders must use other factors, such as language, fashion, and ‘attitude,’ in creating a masculine identity…Like the African American men who create a ‘cool pose’ masculinity” (Anderson 69). Therefore, what skiing lingo accomplishes covertly through the underlying themes of prestige, exclusivity, and class distinction associated with the sport’s European technical terms, snowboarding language achieves more bluntly, and in the opposite direction, though gangster lingo. Both skiing and snowboarding adopt specific linguistic and dialectic terms to send a cultural message; snowboarding, true to form, simply refuses to apologize for doing so.

Despite a foundation of antipathy, however, skiing and snowboarding dialects have increasingly begun to merge as snowboarding gains cultural acceptance and joins the ‘mainstream’—a phenomenon highlighted by snowboarding’s presence in the Olympics, and one which has inspired some counter-culture devotees to strap into the once-maligned skis. Heino quotes the Transworld Snowboarding’s managing editor as admitting, “Skiing is punk again. The opposite of what convention is” (Heino 185). Consequently, terms once exclusive to one lingo or the other are being shared: skiers can now ‘shred the pow’; snowboarders can race ‘slalom’ and ride ‘moguls.’ The two once-distinct languages are gradually merging into one. Whatever the future of ski and snowboard speech, however, these lingos have achieved remarkable complexity, originality, and cultural relevance for two dialects founded around skidding down snow on planks, and they show no signs of slowing down.

Works Cited

Anderson, Kristin L. “Snowboarding: The Construction of Gender in an Emerging Sport.” Sage Journal of Sport and Social Issues, vol. 23, no. 1, 1999, pp. 55-79. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0193723599231005

Heino, Rebecca. “What is So Punk about Snowboarding?” Sage Journal of Sport and Social Issues, vol. 24, no. 2, 2000, pp. 176-191, doi.org/10.1177/0193723500242005. Accessed 19 Feb. 2018.

Jarka, Horst. “The Language of Skiers.” American Speech, vol. 38, no. 3, 1963, pp. 202–208. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/454100. Accessed 18 Feb. 2018.

Liedke, Herbert R. “The Evolution of the Ski-Lingo in America.” Monatshefte Für Deutschen Unterricht, vol. 35, no. 3/4, 1943, pp. 116–124. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/30169965. Accessed 19 Feb. 2018

Thorpe, Holly. “Embodied Boarders: Snowboarding, Status, and Style.” Waikato Journal of Education, vol. 10, 2004, pp. 181-201. http://www.wje.org.nz/index.php/WJE/article/view/339. Accessed 19 Feb. 2018

1. I use the singular ‘they’ intentionally in this essay in an attempt to avoid gendered speech. ↑