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

Claudia Ortu

2019-01-01

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Abstract

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.