As a forensic discipline, forensic linguistics has been established for many years at Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) under the designation of “author identification” and therefore occupies a special position, not only in Germany. Its tasks include analysing incriminating texts from a wide range of offences on the one hand and managing the National Collection of Incriminating Texts on the other which, beyond performing corpus queries and other investigative functions, also supports the police in their forensic activities. This article presents the possibilities of linguistic text analysis, the most important theoretical foundations, the procedural steps and the relevant methods. While forensic linguistics at the BKA is closely connected to other forensic sciences and exhibits a high degree of professionalism, further development potential exists for the training of forensic linguistics expertise beyond the BKA.