37.1481, Reviews: Forensic Linguistics in Southern Africa: Russell H. Kaschula; Monwabisi K. Ralarala; Eliseu Mabasso; Zakeera Docrat; Wellman Kondowe; Paul Svongoro (2025)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-37-1481. Sun Apr 19 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.1481, Reviews: Forensic Linguistics in Southern Africa: Russell H. Kaschula; Monwabisi K. Ralarala; Eliseu Mabasso; Zakeera Docrat; Wellman Kondowe; Paul Svongoro (2025)

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Date: 19-Apr-2026
From: Asimina Papachristodoulou [asiminaki1994 at windowslive.com]
Subject: Russell H. Kaschula; Monwabisi K. Ralarala; Eliseu Mabasso; Zakeera Docrat; Wellman Kondowe; Paul Svongoro (2025)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/36-3941

Title: Forensic Linguistics in Southern Africa
Subtitle: Origins, Progress, and Prospects
Series Title: Elements in Forensic Linguistics
Publication Year: 2025

Publisher: Cambridge University Press
           http://www.cambridge.org/linguistics
Book URL:
https://www.cambridge.org/ch/universitypress/subjects/languages-linguistics/applied-linguistics-and-second-language-acquisition/forensic-linguistics-southern-africa-origins-progress-and-prospects?format=HB&isbn=9781009705202

Author(s): Russell H. Kaschula; Monwabisi K. Ralarala; Eliseu Mabasso;
Zakeera Docrat; Wellman Kondowe; Paul Svongoro

Reviewer: Asimina Papachristodoulou

SUMMARY
Forensic Linguistics in Southern Africa: Origins, Progress and
Prospects by Russell H. Kaschula, Monwabisi K. Ralarala, Eliseu
Mabasso, Zakeera Docrat, Wellman Kondowe, and Paul Svongoro is an
open-access Study in Cambridge’s Studies in Forensic Linguistics
series. It surveys the emergence and consolidation of forensic
linguistics across southern Africa and, more selectively, other
African regions, with an explicit concern for access to justice and
the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 16. The book is
framed as both an introduction and a progress report: it maps
historical origins of the field, identifies key subfields relevant to
the region and documents institutional developments that the authors
interpret as indicators of maturation.
The opening situates forensic linguistics in relation to the
multilingual and postcolonial legal realities of African states. It
briefly recalls canonical origin stories of forensic linguistics as an
identifiable practice, then moves to the question that drives the
Study: why language expertise is not peripheral but central in justice
systems where colonial languages often remain dominant in court and
policing institutions despite widespread multilingualism among court
users. In this introduction, the authors also sketch the scope of the
field as they will treat it: they include both “language as evidence”
concerns, such as authorship attribution, and “language of the law”
concerns, such as courtroom discourse, interpreting and police
interviewing. The tone is programmatic but grounded in an extensive
citation base, which functions as a guided map for readers who want to
move from overview to primary studies.
A core thread through the Study is the concept of the language of
record and proceedings, treated not as a technicality but as a
mechanism through which legal participation is enabled or obstructed.
The authors discuss how, in multilingual settings, a monolingual
record regime can generate systemic dependence on interpreting and
translation. South Africa is used as a particularly concrete example,
as the Study describes the decision associated with Heads of Courts in
2017 to adopt English as the sole official language of record and it
reflects on the paradox of a multilingual constitutional order
coexisting with increasingly monolingual record-making practices. The
section also gestures towards comparable tensions elsewhere in
southern Africa, where colonial languages continue to structure court
processes and documentation.
The Study then turns to legal interpreting in southern Africa,
presenting a synthesis that the authors describe as grounded in a
systematic literature review of work focused on Zimbabwe, South
Africa, Malawi and Mozambique. Here, the “language of record” problem
becomes operational: if proceedings and official records are conducted
in a dominant language, then interpreters become the principal bridge
between institutions and litigants, witnesses and accused persons. The
authors emphasise the particularly high reliance on interpreting in
lower courts handling large volumes of criminal matters and they
underline the fact that the difficulty of interpreting is not only
lexical but conceptual, given differences in legal systems and the
culturally embedded nature of legal categories. The chapter’s overall
trajectory is reformist, repeatedly pointing to the need for improved
training, support and professionalisation if interpreting is to
safeguard fairness rather than introduce new vulnerabilities.
A further shift of institutional site occurs in the section on police
investigative interviewing. The authors argue that multilingualism and
institutional language policies can create heightened risks at the
policing stage, especially where cautions, rights information, or
interview questions are delivered in a dominant language that does not
match the suspect’s or witness’s strongest language. They treat
interviewing as a communicative event shaped by power relations and
procedural safeguards, and they connect poor linguistic access to
risks such as coercion and unreliable statements. Importantly, the
Study explicitly acknowledges that research on police interviewing in
southern Africa is still relatively scarce and that much available
work is concentrated on interview interpreting rather than on broader
interviewing practice. In this section, the authors engage with
international guidance aimed at improving interview ethics and
effectiveness, including the Principles on Effective Interviewing for
Investigations and Information Gathering (the Méndez Principles) and
they advocate for regional uptake, translation and awareness-raising
as part of a shift away from coercive interrogation styles.
The final section charts future directions and is distinctive in that
it does not only summarise scholarship but also records institutional
milestones. The Study highlights an emerging infrastructure for the
field, including publication platforms, formal degree offerings and
research centres, and it points to South African initiatives connected
to the University of the Western Cape, such as a dedicated research
chair and the planned operations of ACARFiL beginning in 2025. It also
includes country-level vignettes beyond southern Africa based on
published work and solicited reports, and it makes a methodological
point that is more consequential than it first appears:
forensic-linguistic work may remain “invisible” because it is not
labelled as such in repositories, meaning that the field can look
smaller than it is. In this future-facing chapter, the authors propose
that the discipline’s prospects depend not only on producing research
but also on consolidating training, institutional support and shared
terminology that makes research discoverable and cumulative.
EVALUATION
This Study’s strongest contribution is that it offers, to my knowledge
as a reader of the African applied-linguistics literature, a genuinely
regional synthesis rather than another single-country “origins”
narrative. It is ambitious in coverage while remaining readable, and
it succeeds in showing that forensic linguistics in southern Africa is
not merely an imported toolkit but a field being shaped by local
sociolinguistic realities, especially the co-presence of multiple
languages and the continuing dominance of colonial languages in
official legal domains. The work is also timely because it treats
linguistic inequities as high-stakes rather than symbolic:
misunderstandings in rights cautions, interpreter-mediated testimony
and record-making practices are presented as mechanisms through which
injustice can be produced, not as occasional communicative accidents.
The repeated link to access to justice and SDG 16 gives the Study an
applied coherence: it reads as a piece that wants to be used, in
curricula as well as in policy discussions.
The book’s breadth is a further strength because it places several
subdomains into one narrative arc. Courtroom discourse, legal
interpreting, police interviewing and authorship attribution are not
treated as separate islands; rather, they are tied together by the
institutional pathway of a case, from police encounter to statement to
trial record. This helps readers to understand why reforms in one part
of the system may be undermined by weaknesses elsewhere. In addition,
the Study’s institutional mapping has practical value. In regions
where a field is still consolidating, the documentation of degree
programmes, research centres and publication venues functions as an
indicator of maturation. The authors’ emphasis on verifiable
milestones, including the establishment of research structures and the
planned operations of ACARFiL, strengthens their argument that the
field is gaining momentum beyond isolated individual projects. Even if
a reader is not persuaded by every evaluative phrase about “growth”,
the institutional developments at least give concrete coordinates for
where activity is concentrated.
Another merit is clarity of presentation. The writing is accessible
and the organising logic is visible from the outset: the reader is
told what the Study will cover and why it matters. The country-level
vignettes, though necessarily brief, generally avoid sweeping
generalisations; they tend to name the justice relevance of the issue
under discussion and point the reader to specific bodies of
literature. This is where the Study’s extensive referencing becomes a
kind of methodological strength. Although the book is not an
experimental study and does not present new datasets, it anchors the
discussion in a wide set of sources and thereby offers an annotated
entryway into primary research across multiple jurisdictions. For
instructors or postgraduate students, this is valuable: the Study can
be used to design reading lists, to motivate thesis topics, or to
justify why a particular subdomain (say, interview interpreting or
language-of-record policy) is not merely “language work” but part of
institutional justice.
However, the same features that make the Study useful also reveal some
limitations. The most important technical limitation is
methodological: despite using the language of “review” and in one
section describing a systematic literature review, the Study does not
set out a systematic review protocol in the sense commonly expected in
evidence-synthesis fields. There is no explicit search strategy, no
inclusion and exclusion criteria, no time bounds and no discussion of
how completeness or representativeness was assessed. This does not
invalidate the synthesis, but it makes it difficult for the reader to
evaluate what has been missed and whether coverage is skewed towards
certain countries, institutions, or publication networks. In a
fast-developing area, this matters because a narrative of “rapid
growth” can be persuasive yet remain impressionistic unless supported
by quantification. The Study frequently signals momentum, but it does
not provide bibliometric indicators such as publication counts over
time, co-authorship patterns, or training enrolment trends. Such
information would not need to dominate the text, but even a brief
quantitative overview could have strengthened the argument and helped
readers distinguish between perceived growth, institutional
consolidation and research output.
A related limitation concerns uneven depth across countries. The Study
is explicitly centred on southern Africa and it is understandable that
South Africa and a small number of other countries receive richer
treatment than other SADC members. Still, the comparative ambition
creates an expectation of balance that is not always met. Some
jurisdictions are mentioned as part of the continental mapping, but
they are not explored in a way that would allow the reader to see
whether the challenges are similar, structurally different, or simply
under-researched. In addition, there is some repetition across
sections, particularly where the colonial-language dominance and
multilingualism tension is restated. For an introductory Study,
repetition can be pedagogically useful, but it sometimes reduces space
that could have been used for deeper synthesis of empirical findings
from the cited studies.
On this point, the Study’s use of references is both a strength and a
missed opportunity. The citations provide entry points, but the book
often stops short of synthesising what the referenced studies actually
found in a comparative way. For example, in discussing court
interpreting, the Study strongly argues for training and regulation,
but it could have been even more practically informative if it
summarised typical categories of interpreter errors reported in the
literature, or the recurring interactional patterns that create
miscommunication in interpreted cross-examination. Similarly, in the
policing chapter, the Study makes compelling normative points about
the dangers of linguistically inaccessible interviewing, but it offers
relatively limited synthesis of what specific interviewing practices
most commonly fail in the region and which procedural safeguards
appear most effective under multilingual conditions. To be fair, the
authors themselves note that the research base on police interviewing
is thin in southern Africa, which constrains what can be synthesised.
Yet even within an emerging literature, there is room for a more
structured taxonomy of subfields tailored to African contexts,
specifying typical data sources, common challenges such as
code-switching or dialect continua and what counts as credible
validation.
A further area where the Study could be strengthened is its discussion
of forensic application standards in court settings. Forensic
linguistics often faces questions about admissibility, reliability and
known error rates, especially in domains such as authorship
attribution. The Study references authorship work and presents it as
part of the regional field’s progress, but it offers limited
discussion of methodological standards for courtroom use, including
how error rates should be estimated and communicated and how expert
conclusions should be framed under uncertainty. This is particularly
important in multilingual settings and for low-resource languages,
where training data and corpora may be sparse and where models or
methods validated on high-resource languages may not transfer in
straightforward ways. The Study’s emphasis on access to justice makes
this omission more salient, because methodological overconfidence can
itself become an access-to-justice problem if linguistic expertise is
presented as more precise than it actually is.
The future-directions chapter is one of the Study’s most useful parts,
but it also invites additional development. The authors convincingly
argue that capacity building is necessary: degree programmes, research
centres, publication ecosystems and better disciplinary naming
practices are all part of making the field sustainable. Yet the
chapter could have offered more concrete, subdomain-specific
recommendations with direct policy relevance. For instance, in the
language-of-record domain, the discussion could be extended by
comparing statutory and administrative frameworks across more SADC
jurisdictions, identifying practical bottlenecks such as transcription
technologies and budget constraints and outlining feasible transition
paths such as pilot courts, bilingual records, or certified
translations attached to the record. In interpreting, the Study
already presses for professionalisation; it could also propose a
structured framework for interpreter accreditation and continuing
professional development, including competencies, supervised practice
requirements and courtroom-specific evaluation protocols. In police
interviewing, the emphasis on internationally aligned principles is
welcome; additional attention to quality assurance mechanisms,
monitoring and complaint procedures could further increase practical
impact.
Finally, although the Study is intentionally focused on foundational
issues, the rapidly changing technological context raises questions
that are increasingly difficult to bracket. Forensic linguistics is
currently being reshaped by automated language tools and justice
systems are adopting legal-tech solutions for search, triage and
document handling. Even without attempting to cover a vast new
literature, the Study’s future directions could more explicitly flag
emerging risks and opportunities tied to large-scale language
technologies in multilingual contexts: the robustness of authorship
analysis in an era of hybrid human–machine texts, the risk of false
positives for non-native writers when automated detectors are used and
the governance and privacy implications of deploying language models
on sensitive legal data. These issues align closely with the Study’s
access-to-justice theme, because technological interventions can
reproduce inequalities when language varieties and proficiency levels
are not adequately represented in validation and auditing.
Despite these critiques, the Study remains an important and usable
contribution. It provides a coherent regional narrative, a scaffold
for teaching and curriculum design and a persuasive case that forensic
linguistics is becoming increasingly relevant in southern Africa
precisely because multilingualism intersects with legal and policing
institutions in ways that can either protect or erode rights. It also
performs a valuable field-building function by recording institutional
developments and by making the “discoverability” problem explicit: a
discipline cannot consolidate if its scholarship is scattered under
inconsistent labels. In my judgement, this Study is best read as a
foundation: it does not close debates, but it clarifies why they
matter, where activity is occurring and what kinds of research and
institutional support are needed if forensic linguistics is to
contribute effectively to justice in the region.
REFERENCES
Kaschula, Russell H., Monwabisi K. Ralarala, Eliseu Mabasso, Zakeera
Docrat, Wellman Kondowe, and Paul Svongoro. 2025. Forensic Linguistics
in Southern Africa: Origins, Progress, and Prospects. Elements in
Forensic Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press &
Assessment.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
My name is Asimina Papachristodoulou and my research interests lie in
the fields of Linguistics and Digital Humanities, with particular
emphasis on the study of language through interdisciplinary and
computational approaches. I am especially interested in syntax,
semantics, sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, and language
annotation, as well as in the ways digital methodologies can enhance
the analysis of discourse, translation, and media language. My broader
academic goal is to contribute to research that bridges theoretical
inquiry with empirical investigation, fostering a deeper understanding
of language as both a cognitive system and a social practice. My aim
is to engage in collaborative, innovative scholarship with relevance
across disciplines.



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