Jan Svartvik

Jan Svartvik was a Swedish linguist and professor of English credited with founding the academic discipline of forensic linguistics. In 1968 he analyzed the police statements attributed to Timothy John Evans in a 1949 murder case in Notting Hill, London, publishing his findings as The Evans Statements: A Case for Forensic Linguistics. Evans had been convicted and executed for the killing but was later exonerated, and Svartvik concluded that Evans had not actually given the statements as they were recorded at trial. Beyond this foundational work, Svartvik also wrote widely used English grammar textbooks and contributed to corpus linguistics research.