1st Call for Papers – IAFLL PORTO 2027
Deadline: 30 November 2026
The University of Porto, in Portugal, will host the 18th Biennial Conference of the International Association for Forensic and Legal Linguistics on the theme of ‘Disruptive Scenarios, Epistemological Challenges, and Improved Scientific Standards’.
The Forensic Linguistics community convenes at a moment of profound transformation for both language and law. Generative AI now produces text indistinguishable, at first glance, from human authorship; synthetic voices and deepfakes destabilise the evidentiary status of recorded speech, with direct implications for forensic phonetics, speaker identification, and authorship analysis. Cybercrime, organised crime, and the migration of social interaction into online environments and the metaverse have multiplied the contexts in which identities are performed, concealed, and contested, while disinformation and foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI) strain the boundaries between protected expression, offensive language, and hate speech. Legal systems, meanwhile, continue to grapple with enduring challenges that forensic and legal linguists have long highlighted: the comprehensibility of legal documents and the literacy demands of legal genres; the dynamics of courtroom, police, and prison discourse; the conduct of investigative interviews and the protection of vulnerable witnesses, increasingly framed by the Méndez Principles; the linguistic disadvantage faced by minorities, migrants, and speakers of non-dominant varieties before the law; the quality of courtroom interpreting and translation; and the legacies of linguistic colonialism that still shape access to justice. Disputed meanings, trademark conflicts, consumer warnings, plagiarism, and deception continue to bring linguists into court as expert witnesses, while cold cases invite renewed analysis with contemporary tools. Across all these domains, courts, regulators, and the wider public are demanding greater transparency, reproducibility, and methodological rigour, while landmark rulings and inquiries continue to expose the costs of expert evidence that falls short of contemporary scientific standards.
These disruptive scenarios raise pressing epistemological questions: What does it mean to attribute authorship when a text may be co-produced with a language model? How do we evaluate linguistic evidence whose provenance is uncertain, whose data are massive, and whose interpretation is increasingly mediated by computation and multimodal sources? How can we communicate uncertainty in ways that genuinely inform legal decision-making? And how do we ensure that the ethical and deontological foundations of our practice keep pace with the technologies and contexts in which it unfolds?
Forensic and legal linguists are uniquely positioned to address these challenges. As it is grounded in the systematic analysis of language in use, attentive to context, variation, and meaning, and increasingly conversant with computational, semiotic, and intercultural perspectives, our field stands at the intersection of multiple humanities, social sciences, and data science disciplines.
This conference, which is organised by the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, invites the community to confront these disruptions head-on, to interrogate the epistemological foundations of our practice, and to advance the scientific standards that will define the discipline’s contribution to justice in the years ahead. The meeting will be held from 12 to 16 July 2027.
Following in the scholarly footsteps of our previous gatherings — IAFL Porto 2012: Bridging the Gaps between Language and the Law; IAFL Porto 2017: New Challenges for Forensic Linguists; IAFLL Porto 2022: Rigour and Transparency in Forensic Linguistics — the 2027 edition promises to continue our Porto tradition of intellectual depth with a dash of Portuguese flair.
The conference will feature parallel, panel, and plenary sessions. As usual, there will also be pre-conference seminars and FL school, designed to foster knowledge exchange and capacity building.
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
Abstract submissions are invited for INDIVIDUAL PAPERS and POSTERS in any of the conference working languages (English, Portuguese, or Spanish). All papers must be original and not simultaneously submitted to another journal or conference.
INDIVIDUAL PAPERS: Individual papers are invited for presentations of 20 minutes, with a further 10 minutes for questions. Abstracts of no more than 300 words, including references, should be sent via the submissions page (https://openreview.net/group?
POSTERS: Proposals for posters of no more than 300 words, including references, should be sent via the submissions page (https://openreview.net/group?
Submissions are invited for work dealing with forensic linguistics / language and the law, including, but not limited to:
Legal Languages:
The history of legal languages
The role of literacy in legal languages
Legal genres
Critical approaches to legal languages
Language education for law professionals
Teaching and research into legal languages
Legal Discourse:
Courtroom, police and prison discourse
Investigative interviewing
Multilingual matters in legal contexts
Power and the law
The comprehensibility of legal documents
Interviews with vulnerable witnesses in the legal system
Spoken interaction in emergency phone calls
The Mendez principles
Language minorities and the legal system:
Linguistic disadvantage before the law
Courtroom interpreting and translation
Human Rights matters
Linguistic colonialism
Law on language:
Language policy and linguistic rights
Offensive language and hate speech
Disinformation and FIMI
The linguist as expert witness
Linguistic evidence and investigative linguistics:
Forensic phonetics and speaker identification
Forensic stylistics
Linguistic analysis for determination of nationality
Authorship analysis
Plagiarism detection and analysis
Disputed meanings
Trademark disputes
Consumer product warnings
Deception and fraud
Other Related Sub-Themes:
Computational Forensic Linguistics
Cybercrime
Organised crime
Online identities, online interaction and communication in the metaverse
Multimodal approaches to forensic linguistics
Forensic Semiotics
Intercultural mediation
Comparative law
Forensic communication
Ethics and deontology in Forensic Linguistics
Applications of forensic linguistic analysis to cold cases
Official languages: The conference official language is English. However, working languages include Portuguese and Spanish, besides English.
Venue: The conference will be held in Porto (Portugal), at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Porto. This will be a live event; online attendance is not planned.
Keynote speakers will be announced soon.
Contact: All questions about submissions should be emailed to forensic.linguistics@letras