Many years ago, a 13-year-old girl went missing in California. In the early 2000s, a woman turned up claiming to be her.
Right away there were things about the woman and her story that seemed off. The young girl had grown up in the state of New York, the woman, however, had a very strong southern accent.
The detectives working on the cold case were so struck by the woman’s strong accent that they decided to speak to a linguistic expert to see if they could identify where in the south she would have been from originally.
Dr Natalie Schilling Photo: Supplied
“The little girl never would have acquired a southern accent, given the known history of her whereabouts and upbringing until she went missing,” says linguistics expert Dr. Natalie Schilling, who teaches forensic linguistics to FBI agents.
The woman was saying things like ‘y’all’ but claimed that she hadn’t spent much time in the south, saying she spent time in Hawaii and the west of the US, says Schilling.
Linguistics analysis suggested that the features of her dialect were too subtle and unusual and that she couldn't have acquired if she had not in fact grown up in the South.
Was this woman the young girl she said she was? It appears no one seems to know - the case is still unsolved.
“I can’t give an opinion as to whether this was an imposter or not but from a linguistics point of view, I can say that the dialect of the woman does not match that of the girl, if this was indeed the person the girl had grown into.”
Different to accent, dialect covers more than just pronunciation, it may include particular vocabulary associated with a region or group of people, it may include accent and it would be characterised by a particular grammatical construction.
People’s accents and dialects are picked up from the people they spend time with and the different areas they live, Schilling says.
However, subtleties are harder to pick up as an adult and even someone who speaks English as a second language with grammatical perfection will still have hints of their original accent.
Forensic linguistics isn’t as clear cut as something like a DNA sample, which provides everything you need to know about an individual. Schilling says when you analyse a language sample you only get that - a slice of language behaviour.
Dr. Schilling's wider expertise is in stylistic variation: how and why individuals use different language styles as they shape and reshape personal, interpersonal, and group identities and relations.
As part of her work, she has spent years recording people on a remote island in Maryland called Smith Island.
“The island community is very interesting, it’s very small, it’s also been undergoing quite dramatic changes over the course of the past few generations from 1985 to nowadays.
“It used to be a larger population, it used to be concentrated in crab fishing and oystering in the Chesapeake Bay. Now it’s become increasingly difficult to make a living via those means and so the population of the island is diminishing, people are having to move elsewhere in order to make a living and so the question for us is what happens to a quite distinctive dialect of American English?”
The people of Chesapeake Bay pronounce things very distinctly compared with other parts of the US and have a very rich vocabulary centred around crabs and catching crabs in the bay.
Their ancestry can be traced back to the 1600s to the south and southwest of England - a history that is very much treasured by the community.
Keeping these old words for crafts like crabbing is important, says Schilling.
“If the Smith Island dialect were to die away as the island loses population, we would lose a lot of knowledge about the ecosystem of the Chesapeake Bay which is an extremely important environmental region in the US.
“Every way of understanding that’s developed over generations, over centuries - especially understanding the local ecology, the traditions in a culture - all of these different ways of understanding really enrich us as humans."
Dr. Natalie Schilling is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University in Washington DC. Dr. Schilling has authored and contributed to articles in numerous publications.
She will give this year's Ian Gordon Fellow Public Lecture at Victoria University, entitled Forensic Linguistics: Solving Crimes through Language, details here.
