In Norway, approximately 18% of all criminal charges are filed against people with immigrant background, thus making linguistic and cultural barriers a common challenge. However, the guidelines for police investigators provide little guidance for how to deal with such challenges.
The overarching aim of this project is to identify sources of communication problems in interviews conducted in Norwegian as L2, and to identify solutions that prove effective in averting and repairing them. In order to do this, the project group will collect and analyze a corpus of 100 audio- and video-recordings of authentic investigative interviews with L2 speakers, the first of its kind worldwide.
Using methods from Conversation Analysis, Second Language Acquisition and Forensic Linguistics, we seek to answer the following questions:
- What factors influence language choice in interviews with L2 speakers of Norwegian?
- What types of miscommunication are characteristic of investigative interviews with suspects conducted in L2
- English or L2 Norwegian?
- How do police officers seek to prevent understanding problems in formulating questions?
- How do police officers deal with L2-related problems in the suspectsʼ answers and accounts?
In collaboration with instructors at the Norwegian Police University College, the project team will use the findings to articulate recommendations for how to decide which language to use with suspects with immigrant background, and how to establish mutual understanding when an interpreter is not used.
The project will thus contribute to securing the human rights of second language speakers in investigative interviews, to improving the effectiveness of the law enforcement system and to raising the publicʼs confidence in the institutions of society.
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