Saps-Speak: The language of the South African police in the post- apartheid era

This article analyses a corpus of internal documents of the South African Police Service (SAPS) in the years after the end of the Apartheid regime (1997-2012) in order to offer an insight into the culture of the organisation through linguistic evidence. The linguistic evidence is operationalised in: choice of language used (SA has 11 official languages), genre characteristics and genre integrity (Bhatia, 2015; Bhatia, 2008; Fairclough, 2003; Leeuwen, 1993; Martin Rose, 2003) intertextuality (Bakhtin, 1986; Fairclough, 1992, 2003; Voloshinov, 1973) and its meaning for the representation of voices in the corpus and, finally ideational metafunction (Halliday Matthiessen, 2004). The corpus has been tagged and studied through the UAM corpus tool (O’Donnel, 2012), which allows quantitative as well as qualitative analysis according to systemic-functional grammar. The linguistic findings are interpreted according to the different trends in political science and anthropology on the issue of police operations in the neo-liberal context.