Call for Papers: 18th Biennial Conference of the International Association of Forensic and Legal Linguistics (IAFLL), University of Porto, Portugal [12-16 July 2027]

The International Association of Forensic and Legal Linguistics (IAFLL) is the international scholarly body for forensic linguistics and language-and-law research. Its biennial conference is the field's principal international meeting, and the 2027 edition is the 18th in the series.

The 18th Biennial Conference is organised by the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Porto, Portugal. Porto has hosted the association three times before: IAFL Porto 2012 (Bridging the Gaps between Language and the Law), IAFL Porto 2017 (New Challenges for Forensic Linguists), and IAFLL Porto 2022 (Rigour and Transparency in Forensic Linguistics).

The theme of the 2027 conference is Disruptive Scenarios, Epistemological Challenges, and Improved Scientific Standards.

The organisers note that the forensic linguistics community meets at a moment of profound transformation for both language and law. Generative AI now produces text that is, at first glance, indistinguishable 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.

Alongside these new pressures, the call points to enduring problems 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; investigative interviews and the protection of vulnerable witnesses, increasingly framed by the Mendez 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.

The call frames the resulting epistemological questions directly: what it means to attribute authorship when a text may be co-produced with a language model; how to evaluate linguistic evidence whose provenance is uncertain, whose data are massive and whose interpretation is increasingly mediated by computation and multimodal sources; how to communicate uncertainty in a way that genuinely informs legal decision-making; and how to keep the ethical and deontological foundations of the practice in step with the technologies and contexts in which it now operates.

Submissions are invited on work dealing with forensic linguistics and language and the law, including but not limited to the following areas.

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 foreign information manipulation and interference (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

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.
• Abstracts must be submitted through the conference submissions page on OpenReview by 30 November 2026.
• Do not include your name, affiliation or email address in the abstract itself.
• Notifications of acceptance will be communicated by 10 January 2027.

All papers must be original and not simultaneously submitted to another journal or conference. Each author may participate, as author or co-author, in a maximum of two submissions.

Proposals for posters follow the same route and the same dates as individual papers.

• Poster proposals of no more than 300 words, including references, submitted through the OpenReview submissions page by 30 November 2026.
• Posters must be A0 size (841mm x 1189mm) in portrait orientation.
• Posters will be on display during the conference.
• Notifications of acceptance will be communicated by 10 January 2027.

The conference will feature parallel, panel and plenary sessions. As in previous editions, there will also be pre-conference seminars and a Forensic Linguistics school, designed to foster knowledge exchange and capacity building.

The official language of the conference is English. Working languages also include Portuguese and Spanish, and abstracts may be submitted in any of the three.

Keynote speakers are to be announced by the organisers.

The conference will be held from 12 to 16 July 2027 in Porto, Portugal, at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Porto. The call states that this will be a live, in-person event and that online attendance is not planned, so delegates travelling from India should plan for physical attendance.

Registration fees have not been announced in this first call. The organisers have said that registration fees will include discounted rates for IAFLL members, students, and delegates from the Global South or lower-income countries. Submitting an abstract carries no fee.

The call is open to the international scholarly community and states no jurisdictional or nationality restriction, so researchers, practitioners and research students based in India may submit on the same terms as anyone else.