Series 2 - Episode 7 - Part 1

* Warning: Today’s episode contains descriptions of murder, gang violence, knife crime, and a violent attack on a young pregnant girl. *

This month, Dr Nicci MacLeod and Professor Tim Grant explore the analysis of Urban British English (UBE) in court. In the first of this two-part episode, Tim discusses a case from 2009 in which he analysed chat logs between two Grime music producers, Maniac and Snoopy Montana, who were accused of conspiracy to murder Maniac’s pregnant girlfriend. Tim drew on corpus linguistics to explore the non-standard variety of English the two used in correspondence with one another to better guide the court on the meaning of the language present in the data.

For a list of our sources and more information about this case, please visit

https://www.aston.ac.uk/writing-wrongs

Have a question for Nicci or Tim? Email us at [email protected] and we may answer it during an upcoming episode!

Check out the official AIFL blog for more forensiclinguistic goodies here:

https://medium.com/@AIFLblog

If you have been affected by any of the themes in thisweek’s episode, please contact one of these free sources:

https://www.samaritans.org/how-we-can-help/contact-samaritan/

https://www.helpguide.org/find-help

Production Team: Mark Round, Jordan Robertson, Neus Alberich Buera, Karolina Placzynta

Sound: Mark Round, Sam Cook

Visual design: George Grant

Additional Voices: Frankie Vu, Aston students