Introduction: Linguistic and cultural imperialism, alas

This chapter introduces the book by providing an overview of the new and quite contemporary lines of argument on the social and political histories of the covered southern African languages. It draws attention to the book’s role as a probe into the generalized neglect of the region’s indigenous languages, official or not. In its entirety, the volume hopes to convince researchers to work on the political and social history of the region’s other languages, and that eventually southern Africa’s politicians and speech communities may decide to give more attention to their indigenous languages. And last but not least, we foresee that this work may help western scholars venture outside the narrow confines of Europe (or Eurasia) so that they could embark on genuinely global-wide comparisons within the field of the world’s political and social history of languages.