From the Forensic Linguistics Files: The Anthrax Letters

I'm taking Forensic Linguistics this term -- a new offering from my school's Department of Applied Linguistics -- and I'm bubbling over with enthusiasm. (Actually I really am -- I realized that that might sound like sly sarcasm, but it is not.) Today the class met for the second time and overviewed the textbook, which is John Olsson's Forensic Linguistics, (London: Continuum Press, 2004.) This is a relatively new field within applied linguistics, fascinating in itself and also because it seems hold out the possibility of work in the field that is not 'Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages.')

So I flipped the book open to chapter 7, "Authorship Profiling," which examines the Anthrax letters. In the second paragraph, the author notes that "at the time [of the Anthrax 'scare'] it was thought by a number of commentators that the anthrax attacks formed part of the alleged Al-Qaida assault on America." I did a double take and re-read the sentence. Does it not appear that he is using the word 'alleged' here to refer to the participation of al Qaeda in the 9/11 attacks as a whole? Isn't this a big deal, or at least progress? Wouldn't you expect a mainstream textbook to toe the party line with regard to the certainty of al Qaeda's authorship of 9/11? I was agog. I'll bring it up eventually, but I felt that I had already done a generally-palatable amount of classroom Truthing today by reporting on some phonetic/language proficiency-based analysis of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard threat ("I will explode you in a couple minutes! Bwahahaha! All your base are belong to us!" -- there's an article about this on Huffington Post that establishes to my satisfaction that the speaker was very unlikely to have been a native Farsi-speaker. The instructor was really into this example, btw.)

So, on to the author's analysis.

Olsson begins with an examination of the envelope sent to Senator Daschle with a focus on identifying clues to the author's native language, or more specifically, clues to whether that language uses the Roman alphabet (like you're reading) or the Arabic one, which includes not only Arabic but Farsi (ooooh... Iran!) and Punjabi (as spoken in Pakistan!) He takes the reader through points that have been considered previously by analysts, including the downward-to-the-right slope (in his opinion, a matter of personal style and not likely to be the result of difficulty with writing left-to-right) and the date format (which could be American OR consistent with the format used in many Arab countries -- thus, no basis for a conclusion.) Ultimately, he points to the writer's use of a mixture of upper- and lower-case letter forms to argue that this person had a great deal of facility with the Roman alphabet.

As for the text of the letter itself, he suggests that "09-11-01. You can not stop us. We have this anthrax. You die now. Are you afraid? Death to America. Death to Israel. Allah is Great" is substantially more terse than would be expected from a non-native English speaker. "It is far from easy for a learner of English to use the language in this concise, precise way." (104) He incorporates the text of the letter sent to Tom Brokaw, as well ("09-11-01. This is next. Take penacilin now. Death to America. Death to Israel. Allah is Great.")and argues that this economical word-usage is more indicative of someone with a good education who is used to doing a lot of writing (and can come up with the odd misspelling and some 'pseudo-pidgin' syntax -- "You die now")than someone who is actually struggling to write in English with very little knowledge of the language.

I'd like to read a more developed version of what is a fairly skeletal chapter, aimed at using this as an example of analytic technique and not actually at making the case for the Anthrax writer being a native user of the Roman alphabet or English speaker. (I would also like to see a version of this analysis used on the "hijacker wills" found in the airport parking lot.) Nonetheless, I was grateful for his choice of example and the notion that it will plant in the mind of most readers of the writer pretending to be an Islamic terrorist.