Doing my Undergraduate degree at the School of Oriental and African Studies gave me a fundamental basis in a broad variety of areas of linguistic study ranging from formal logic and semantics, to Arabic and Persian grammar, and language policy and revitalization. This provided me with the basis on which to choose a specialization that has direct impact on the way that we seek justice and use language as evidence. Going on to study Forensic Linguistics at the Centre for Forensic Linguistics at Aston University further expanded my toolkit to embrace the “big issues” which are prevalent in our society; for example how language is used in child grooming scenarios, the language used in investigative police interviews, and the way that individuals create deceptive language.
I have since used this forensic training in helping to code and screen data for projects which are looking for ways to identify the native language of people speaking English – primarily Persian speakers of English