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.