1044. Today, I'm talking about a strange disappearance that forensic linguist Natalie Schilling worked on that she calls "the case of the mystery dialect."
1044. Today, I'm talking about a strange disappearance that forensic linguist Natalie Schilling worked on that she calls "the case of the mystery dialect." This is the original bonus segment from our conversation back in October. Grammarpaloozians who support the show get these segments right when they come out, and maybe more importantly, give us the help we need to keep going and produce the bonus segments. So many thanks to all you wonderful Grammarpaloozians!
Natalie Schilling is a professor emerita of linguistics at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, and runs a forensic linguistics consulting firm. You can find her on LinkedIn.
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Mignon: Grammar Girl here, I'm Mignon Fogarty, and today I have the bonus segment from my interview with forensic linguist Natalie Schilling back in October, and I thought this one was especially interesting — we talked about a really strange disappearance Natalie worked on that she calls "the case of the mystery dialect.
Grammarpaloozians who support the show get these segments right when they come out, and maybe more importantly, give us the help we need to keep going and produce these bonus segments. So many thanks to all you wonderful Grammarpaloozians. I hope when people hear what great work you're helping us make, they'll join too.Â
Greetings, Grammarpaloozians. Thank you so much for supporting our show, and the love of language, and all the work we do. We're here with Natalie Schilling, forensic linguistic emerita professor from Georgetown. And so you have a story about a project you worked on that involved a mystery dialect, you tell me.
NATALIE: I do. Yeah. So I can tell you about this case, as I sometimes call "the case of a mystery dialect." This case involved, is a cold case. It involved a young girl, 12 or 13 years old, who went missing from a military base in California in 1981. So many decades ago, she goes missing.
She has siblings. So it's a little girl. She has some brothers and sisters. The siblings are told she ran away, and you are never to speak about her again. So the parents tell the kids, "No, we don't talk about it. She ran away. Don't, we don't speak of it." So for more than 10 years, there's no sign of this girl. There's no communication from the girl. There's no report to any police.
Finally, in 1994, one of the siblings of this person—her name's Mary—the sibling files a missing persons report. So this is what, about 13 years after the girl had gone missing? At the time, the police in the military base didn't really do much investigating because the case by then was already so old.
A few years later, in 2002, there was kind of some wrap-up investigative work being done on this military base because it was closing down. And there was a dog, you know, a cadaver, a military investigative dog who was brought in. The police were given some sort of tip about a particular house, the house where this family had lived, and the siblings reported, "Well, there was a part of the yard that we were always told not to go to."
So the investigators brought in their cadaver dog to see if, you know, can the dog find anything, maybe there's, maybe this person, the siblings, at least some of them, always suspected that this person had been killed; that the father, who was actually the stepfather of the girl, had killed her.
He was known to be an angry person. He was known to argue with the kids. He was known to actually hurt the kids, including Mary, the person who went missing. So the dog was brought in. This is now quite a long time after the initial disappearance, and the dog alerted. So investigators dug, but all they found was a shoe.
They didn't find any remains, nothing like that. And at this point, you're asking yourself, "I have no idea what this has to do with forensic linguistics or with language evidence," but it actually does. It also does point to a challenge in doing forensic linguistic work: is that sometimes the cases that you're involved in can be quite gruesome, you know, and quite painful. It sometimes sounds glamorous to people to hear, "Oh, you work with investigators, and you solve crimes," but it's tough. It can be very hard. And sometimes, you know, the cases involve crimes against children, which is very hard to deal with. In this case, so we have this shoe, no body, but a mysterious cadaver dog alert—no person.
But this alert and the finding drive the investigators to question the mom and stepfather of the missing Mary. So finally, they start doing an actual full investigation. They question these people; they're looking for all kinds of clues, trying to find this missing person. The stepfather admits to having been angry, to having hurt her.
But he comes just short of actually confessing.Â
NATALIE: Yes. Then, a short time later, just a few months later, there’s a traffic stop in Phoenix, Arizona. The investigation was taking place in coastal California.
Traffic stop in Phoenix, Arizona. "All right, let me see your license and registration." One of the people in the vehicle that stopped is, "Oh, yeah, that's me. I'm Mary. I'm that one from, you know, back in the day. Yeah, that's me." She has a license in her name. All of a sudden, here she is. "Yeah, I know. I was missing for 20, 20-plus years, and nobody heard from me. I ran away. That's what happened."
And the investigators are thinking, "Well, first of all, isn't that convenient?" You know, a few months after the stepfather almost gets arrested for this crime. Now, this person who's been missing for decades suddenly shows up. But the investigators thought it seemed suspect.
So her stories like we're … they interviewed her a couple of times, some long interviews. Her stories were kind of rambling, and they contradicted each other. And she just didn't seem to know basic facts about what you would know if you were this person. But one of the things about the case that was also just off and strange that they noticed right away is they said, "Oh my gosh, why does she sound like she does?"
She has this really strong Southern accent. And why would this missing Mary, who she actually spent most of her growing-up years in upstate New York before the family moved to various other army or military bases (I can't remember if it was army or not) before they had moved to different places and eventually ended up in California.
So they asked her; they said literally on the tape of one of the interviews, the detective says, "Where'd you get that accent, Mary?" And she says, "Well, since I ran away, I spent a lot of time in California and also Arizona. And I made a few trips to Louisiana and, I believe, Georgia," she said.
But no, most of my time has been out here in California and Arizona. That's basically where I've been. And so the detective said, "Well, how can that be if it's really a Southern accent?" So they had contacted several linguists, myself included, and said, first of all, are we right? Is this a Southern accent?
And then, second of all, if it is, is it at all possible or likely that a person who, if it's really Mary, could she have that accent? Is there some way that it's really the missing Mary, and she has a Southern accent even though she doesn't have a Southern upbringing?Â
MIGNON: Given where she said she spent her time.
NATALIE: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I worked with some students at Georgetown University, and we did analysis of the data that we had.
We had two hour-long interviews. So we had a good bit of speech from her. They weren't of the greatest sound quality. We usually don't get optimal audio quality in forensic linguistic data, which is another challenge. And we considered language features on all levels. We considered vocabulary features or lexical features, and we found, first of all, our impression was, yes, it sounds Southern, but kind of odd.
I don't even know exactly; almost like an exaggerated Southern. It sounds Southern, but is it? And are there some subtle features such as the Labov "that" versus "the-at"? Is there something like that "that" we can, that we could uncover and maybe give some clues? If this person's an imposter, which the detective suspected, can we help pinpoint, okay, where did she come from?
So this is another case of speaker profiling. So we said, well, she's using Southern lexical features; she's using "y'all," which has, nowadays, spread beyond the South, but still very much associated with the Southern U.S. She's using "daddy" to talk about dad, even though she's an adult. This is sometimes an address term that we are, type of usage that we find in the South, and her pronunciations were very interesting.
So she has some strong Southern pronunciation features. She has a so-called Southern drawl, which in linguistics refers to dragging; like your vowel sounds are lengthened, like literally, they're longer in duration. And they often what we call break into more than one part. So a word like "sit" might almost sound like "see it," like “see”C plus "it."
Why don't you "see it" down there? And so Mary has that feature. She also says "set" more like "say-it," "say it" down. So these are subtle features of a Southern dialect. And these interestingly are not features that are found in all Southern dialects, but just some of them, particularly ones that are in the Appalachian South or the Mountain South.
Which is a subdialect of the Southern dialect that is known to dialectologists, not necessarily to people outside of the world of linguistics. And so, at first, we said, "Well, maybe she's somebody who's from that dialect area. Maybe this is an imposter, and she's from this Appalachian area."
But the weird thing that we noticed is when—well, she has these features that are associated with the strongest of the strong Southern accents. Let's put it that way: she's missing a feature that is like the quintessential pronunciation feature of Southern American English, which is this "ah" for "I." What time is it? "Do you lack me" for "Do you like me?"
And that was just very unexpected. And so the detectives asked, "Well, is it somebody who's disguising a dialect?" And we decided no, because first of all, her dialect—her accent—is consistent across these very long interviews, two-plus hours. It would be thinking of cognitive load. Your brain gets overloaded.
If you're lying about who you are, you're trying to keep your story straight, your content—you're thinking about that. You're also thinking, "I'm going to put on a weird Southern accent and really fool people." That would be a lot. That is highly unlikely that you would be successful or consistent in doing that.
And also, why would somebody pretending to be this Mary—why would they pretend to be Southern when she was never Southern? So you think, no, if anything, if you had a Southern accent, you try to hide it. So we said, "No, it's not fake, but maybe it's something like a mixed dialect." So is it possible that this, that Mary, who did—her family did move around; her stepdad was
military—could it be that she picked up some Southern and not others? The Southern dialect, features associated, as I said, with only the most Southern of the Southern dialect, but yet she didn't have this foundational feature that is actually literally the defining feature of Southern American English, which is the "tahm" for "time."
So it ended up just being a mysterious conclusion. This is another generalization or general fact about doing forensic linguistics work: we don't always have a linguistic smoking gun, and we can't always say definitively. In fact, we usually don't definitively say—well, we never, we never should say, "This is your person or this isn't."
We're there to give opinions, expert opinions about the language evidence, not about the case itself, if that makes sense. So I could say, "Yes, this person's dialect is consistent with somebody of the actual Mary's background," or "No, it's not consistent with somebody of the actual Mary's background." But because I'm not the investigator, I don't have the DNA. I don't have all that. I can't say anything about is it actually this person; that's really kind of going beyond my expertise.
But the conclusion my students and I actually reported to the cold case detective was that it's that the dialect, while we can't pinpoint definitively where it's from, we can say that it is not consistent with what we would expect of the dialect of the actual girl who disappeared when she was 13.
MIGNON: Did they ever conclusively find? Was it Mary?
NATALIE: Very interestingly, I actually skipped a step in the whole process. So when the investigation was first opened in 2002, in the early two thousands, the investigators, once this imposter surfaced, the investigators took some DNA. So, speaking of evidence beyond the linguistics, it was found that the person was a match for being a daughter of the mom.
So they actually closed the case. Then a few years later, around 2008, the case was reopened because there was another cadaver dog alert at another house where this family had lived. Again, there was nothing found, but there was an alert again. So there's this huge open question. First of all, there's no body.
MIGNON: Yeah.
NATALIE: One way or the other.
And there's no conclusive proof that this DNA is Mary herself. It could be a different sibling. The mother in this family had a number of children, some with the same father, some with different fathers, a number, several of which had been put in foster care. Mary herself had been in and out of foster care.
At least one had been adopted by a different family. So it is possible that it could be a different sibling. So the investigators reopened the case, and that's when they brought in the linguist to give some opinion because there was still enough doubt that maybe it's not her. But unfortunately, none of the linguists they talked to—I mean, we weren't able to conclusively say yes or no, but we could say it seems likely you've got somebody who isn't the original person.
So we were able to say that. Then a few years after all that, CBS "48 Hours" made a special about this case, and they had somebody go interview the person who claimed to be Mary. And this time it was around 2017. Mary was talking about, "Oh, what did you do in all those years when you were missing, when you ran away?"
"Well, I lived for a while with this woman in California, I think it was." And so the team making the documentary went to talk to this woman, and she said, "Well, here's a photograph of Mary with me and my kids from blah blah year after Mary had gone missing," after the original 1981 disappearance of Mary.
And researchers in another area of analysis, another area of scientific analysis, actually did some work in terms of computational matching. Can you match the face in the photo to pictures to Mary to the pictures of the little girl? That family had some photographs before Mary went missing, and they actually, they actually, the research or the analysts did conclude that it was a very high probability of a match.
So, again at this point, the investigation was ended, but the cold case detective in the case still had lingering doubts. And I have to say that I still have lingering doubts because that dialect is so mysterious, and kids really quite quickly we acquire our dialects quite early, you know, our core features of our core dialect.
And it's actually kind of, it's pretty hard to really shake those features, especially these features we're not really aware of, like these subtle pronunciation features. So very odd that you would somehow get rid of that "ah" for "I" along the way, but not other features. So it's all just very, it's still shrouded in mystery to this day.
And there's, interestingly, a linguistic mystery at the heart of it.
MIGNON: Interesting. So not everything fits into a nice, clean box that you can just say this or that or yes or no.
NATALIE: No, it really doesn't. And also because that's just how language works. Right? It's not that there's, there's not a one-to-one correlation between, or there's no either/or a hundred percent because I have these dialect features, I'm this person with these demographics we all use, you know, dialect differently in different situations.
For example, things do change as we get older. Not necessarily our core features, but people do disguise and put on accents. There's just so many reasons that it's not that needed. It can also very well be the case that maybe you were born and raised in California, but everybody around you was from the South.
The people you loved and cared about and hung out with the most were all Southern, then maybe you would have a Southern accent. So that's a caution in forensic linguistics is that we don't have, it's not DNA evidence.
MIGNON: Absolutely fascinating. Thank you so much, Natalie Schilling. Oh, would you be able to share with us some book recommendations? Something, you know, maybe about a really good book about forensic linguistics, or a novel you've recently enjoyed, or even one of your favorite cookbooks?
NATALIE: Oh, boy. I would, let me think, I would recommend, as far as forensic linguistics, there's a book that's coming out that isn't out yet. There is a book called "Speaking of Crime." This book is soon going to be out in a new edition. It's by Larry Solan, S-O-L-A-N, and Tammy Gales, G-A-L-E-S. And I would recommend that listeners and viewers be on the lookout for that book to come out.
It provides an accessible and really fascinating introduction for people who'd like to learn more about how language can be used to potentially solve crimes or at least throw a wrinkle into these cases that we're still not really sure of their resolution.
MIGNON: Yeah, that's fascinating. I'd love to read more about it. So "Speaking of Crime" is the book that's coming out, and we've been talking with Natalie Schilling, forensic linguist. And if you ever find yourself in need of a forensic linguist, you can find her on LinkedIn. Thanks so much, Natalie.
NATALIE: Thank you very much.
MIGNON: I hope you enjoyed that bonus segment. In addition to extras like this, Grammarpalooza subscribers get ad-free episodes, and our deep, deep appreciation for supporting the show. I love to tell people all the fascinating, wonderful things about English, to spread the love of language, but it does take time and resources, and I need your help. So, if you're interested in becoming a supporting Grammarpaloozian, you can just use the button right on the show listing in Apple Podcasts or visit quickanddirtytips.com/bonus to sign up by text message or to learn more.
I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl and the author of the tip-a-day book, "The Grammar Daily." That's all. Thanks for listening.