Handwriting is likewise very hard to imitate, although penmanship seems bound
to be driven out by virtual (gender-neutral) keyboardship. Yet, like speech,
writing is a manifestation of identity on several levels. Handwriting analysis
recognizes national features, class features, and individual features that
distinguish communities of writers. A writer’s national, social, and educational
background permeates his or her writing, independent of medial materialization
as handwriting, print, or screen. Spelling and punctuation may help to
identify/verify the writer of a blackmail letter, last will, or suicide note.
Other methods of author identification include historical lexicography and
stylometry. Drawing on large text corpora, historical lexicography can say with a
high degree of accuracy when a word was coined and became current. A
purportedly 18th-century text that includes 20th-century words is thus
suspicious. Stylometry looks for characteristic stylistic patterns, using statistics,
for example, about the total size of a writer’s lexicon and the frequency of
occurrence of types of words and collocations. Sophisticated computer programs
can process huge amounts of text to uncover patterns the unaided reader cannot
easily recognize.
These quantitative methods have opened up new approaches to authorship
attribution of both historical and contemporary literary works. For forensic and
law enforcement purposes they are also increasingly applied to online texts.
Individual parameters of language variation allow speakers and writers to exhibit
their identity and at the same time make it difficult to escape from it.
The identity of languages
In view of the many identificatory features of language distinguishing groups
and individuals, it is perhaps not surprising that people project their ideas of and
needs for identity and group membership onto the medium that facilitates
participation: their primary language. They reify their language, conceiving of it
as a thing, or rather a living organism with its own identity. As soon as a
language becomes part of formal education or is dominated by another such
language, its speakers tend to essentialize it as ‘our soul’, ‘our cultural
fingerprint’, ‘the cornerstone of our national pride’, ‘a mirror of the nation’, ‘the