According to the UK’s Telegraph, language experts and ecologists have teamed to help police solve crimes. Using a statistical method designed to distinguish marine environments by the species that inhabit them, linguists are studying spelling, grammar, and syntax of words in order to identify authors of anonymous text messages. The method helped successfully prosecute David Hodgson for the murder of Jenny Nicholl, a Yorkshire teenager who disappeared in 2005. Comparing text messages written by Nicholl to messages sent from her phone after the disappearance, analysts concluded it likely that Hodgson authored the later ones. Dr. Tim Grant of the Centre for Forensic Linguistics at Aston University solicited help from the ecologists, which has resulted in the collection and study of over 8,000 text messages. “We can measure similarity and difference by means of the stylistic distance between any two text messages,” Grant said. “Pairs of text messages by the same author are going to be more alike. And where you get groups of people who text one another a lot, or pairs of people, their language becomes more similar. We’re moving away from human-based expertise and opinion to a method which will make it easier to discuss things like error rates.” According to the article more testing will be done before the courts accept the methodology as routine.