Announcing the 20th International Summer School in Forensic Linguistic Analysis (ISSFLA 2026)

By Madison Hunter

The International Summer School in Forensic Linguistic Analysis (ISSFLA) was founded in 2000 by Professor Malcolm Coulthard to address topics pertaining to the role, shape, and evidential value of language in legal and forensic contexts. It was created as a response to a growing demand for a course affording an overview of forensic linguistics while also laying solid foundations for a further study of this relatively new branch of applied linguistics.

Since its inception, editions have been hosted in cities around the world including Barcelona, Kuala Lumpur, Lodz, Mainz, Manila, Porto, and on several occasions, Birmingham. The aim of the ISSFLA has been and continues to be to introduce our participants to a variety of topics falling under the umbrella of forensic linguistics. Such topics have included (but are not limited to) the nature of legal language, forensic authorship analysis, linguistic copyright issues, plagiarism and its detection, and legal translation and interpreting. What is more, our tutors are leading scholars and practitioners in the topics we offer, which provides our participants the unique opportunity to interact directly with those responsible for recent developments in the field.

After a brief hiatus, the ISSFLA returned in 2025 for a successful 19th edition hosted by the Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics (AIFL). Now, we are preparing to host it once again for its 20th edition from 16–19 June 2026 and we are trying to reach as wide an audience as possible to let people know what they can expect if they decide to join us this year.

When designing this year’s programme, we started with the feedback from our 19th edition participants, and this feedback sparked an idea for a new and improved structure intended to highlight both the research and practical aspects of the field. Forensic linguistics, after all, is a field where the two are inextricably linked — the research informs the practice, and the practice drives the research.

The beauty of the design is that it also provides us the opportunity to demonstrate how we at AIFL work to achieve our main goal of improving the delivery of justice through linguistic analysis. Across the four days of the 2026 ISSFLA, participants will be introduced to four major themes in forensic linguistics: authorship analysis, spoken interactions, online harmful discourse, and disputed meanings. In the mornings, our tutors will introduce relevant theory, common methodologies, and the types of questions we ask in our research. The afternoons will then be spent discussing real-world applications of the research and providing the participants the opportunity to try out what they have learned for themselves on relevant and authentic data.

To make things even more interesting, we have also planned evening events for the first 3 days of the summer school — day 1 is a special lecture by Dr Andrea Nini (University of Manchester), day 2 is a social, and day 3 is a special workshop by the safeguarding organisation Senso.cloud.

If the ISSFLA 2026 sounds interesting to you and you want to know more about it, please visit our website! There you will find the link to the shop to pay for registration — it will be £525 for the full programme and £150 for individual days, which will include the tuition, course materials, lunches, coffee/tea/biscuits, and a ‘swag bag’. There is also a copy of the 2026 programme in full, FAQs, our contact information, and more, so check it out!

One final thing to add is that we do have participant awards that will cover the registration fees for the full programme for two participants. This does require an application to be sent to us, the details of which are on our website! Applications are due by 13 February 2026 at 5pm UK time with notifications being sent out the week commencing 2 March 2026.

We are so excited for this year’s ISSFLA, and we can’t wait to welcome our 2026 cohort in June!