The origin of this volume on The Social and Political History of Southern Africa’s Languages dates back to the late 2000s. At that time, after over a decade of research, Tomek (Tomasz Kamusella) completed the extensive monograph The Politics of Language and Nationalism in Modern Central Europe (Kamusella 2008). In the course of his work on this book, Tomek chanced across a new kind of reference works that began treating Europe ’s languages as entities with their own history , shaped by the politics and social dynamics of their times and regions (cf Janich and Greule 2002; Price 1998). Previously, the history of a language meant a diachronic study of the changes in a language’s syntax, lexicon or phonemic system. On the whole linguists preferred to stick to the present and to describe and analyze languages as they have encountered them. Sociolinguists turned the table a bit, showing that social stratification both engenders language difference, while the latter reflects and often deepens social difference at the symbolical level. They also turned their attention to the processes of language making (known as ‘standardization ’ or ‘codification ’), aspiring to influence it through ‘language planning ’ and in order to study the social (and some political) history of these processes (cf Haugen 1966).
Importantly, sociolinguists took the study of languages out from the hands of theoretical linguists and showed that no scientific laws govern at least the sphere of deciding what is or what is not a language (cf Bourdieu 1991). Such decisions are inherently political, hence from the scholarly point of view accidental and, in essence, arbitrary. This news made historians and social scientists aware that languages are not ‘organisms in their own right’ (as August Schleicher proposed [1863]), but products of human imagination (cf Burke 2004; Evans 1998). It is people and their groups who create and shape the media of their communication. None other but humans developed (in the Greco-Latin West) the concept of ‘a language’ (Einzelsprache) itself, meaning a self-contained entity, which in the wake of the West-centered imperial and postimperial globalization became the standard way of thinking about the linguistic (cf Calvet 1974; Stoll 1982). At present, the world’s globalized sociopolitical reality comes in the preset standard entities of the nation, the nation-state and a language (cf Kamusella 2012; Reiter 1984). Other (i.e., non-Western) manners of thinking and shaping the linguistic, the social or the political are seen as ‘quaint’ and essentially ‘backward,’ though not so long ago it was the other way around (cf Kamusella 2015). It is precisely for this reason that applied linguists have recently called for ‘disinvention’ and ‘reconstitution’ of languages (cf Makoni and Pennycook 2007), while others have advocated the ‘decolonization of African languages ’ (cf Wa Thiong’o 1981; Ndhlovu 2006, 2015a). After finishing his work on the history of language politics in Central Europe , Tomek began searching for works which from a similar perspective analyze the sociolinguistic reality in South Africa , but did not find any. Why was he especially interested in South Africa ? In 1991 Tomek studied in this country, reading for a master’s degree in South African English literature (Kamuzela 1991). At that time he was surprised at a similarity between the Soviet and apartheid language policy . In the Soviet Union dominated by the ethnic Russians, other sizeable ethnolinguistic groups (‘nationalities’) were often created by Moscow’s fiat and subsequently granted with their own union republics, where a given nationality’s language (again, frequently constructed on the hoof by Moscow’s ‘language engineers’) was nominally official and national (Grenoble 2003; Martin 2001). In South Africa , the apartheid regime created similar homelands (disparaged by critics as ‘Bantustans ’), where ‘nonwhite’ ethnic groups (nations) were to be contained in line with the language they happened to speak. In turn such ‘black’ languages had often been created at the turn of the 20th centuries by missionaries as European-style entities complete with grammars , dictionaries and school textbooks. The ostensible goal was to ‘Christianize heathens,’ that is, to liquidate the indigenous population’s own religions and other systems of belief (cf Hastings 1997: ch 6; Stoll 1982). Deprived of their own heritage, the indigenous populations became pliable to the imposition of ‘civilization’ by colonial administration and were largely unable to oppose this foreign and insidious incursion.
In apartheid South Africa , the ‘black homelands’ (where the ‘nonwhite’ population was to be ‘concentrated’) would ensure white dominance over the country, especially after such ‘Bantustans ’ had become autonomous or nominally independent nation-states. In a similar fashion, the creation of the ethnically non-Russian union republics ensured domination for ethnic Russians across most of the territory in the Soviet Union. When these republics gained independence and became ethnolinguistically defined nation-states after the breakup of the Soviet Union, not more than 15 percent of ethnic non-Russians remain in today’s Russian Federation, and even they are contained to their autonomous republics. After the establishment of democracy in South Africa in 1994, this country followed a different route: all the homelands (including even the nominally independent ones such as Transkei, Ciskei and Bophuthatswana) were reabsorbed. These homelands’ official-cum-national languages were added to apartheid South Africa’s two official languages of Afrikaans and English, in line with the ideas of Nelson Mandela’s friend, the sociolinguist Neville Alexander , who had patiently appealed for the decolonization of the linguistic in this country. However, to this day, the constitutional provision of official multilingualism is observed in breach, as pointed out in the volume by Finex Ndhlovu and Liqhwa Siziba in their chapter on ‘English in Southern Africa’ (also cf Ndhlovu 2008). English has become the country’s dominant language, unlike in the case of the post-Soviet nation-states, where in most cases the local national language became the only or leading official one to the detriment and even to the disappearance from the public sphere of the formerly imperial/dominant language of Russian. Additionally, the political independence from Russia and the cultural one from the Russians were frequently emphasized by the replacement of the ‘Russian’ alphabet of Cyrillic with the (‘western,’ ‘progressive’) Latin script for writing national languages in the independent post-Soviet nation-states (Kellner-Heinkele and Landau 2012).
The Social and Political History of Southern Africa’s Languages
Having observed the radically diverging paths of language policy development in post-apartheid South Africa and the post-Soviet nation-states, and the pronounced absence of material on the social and political history of post-apartheid South Africa’s 11 official languages , in 2009 Tomek proposed to Palgrave the idea of a book that would tentatively fill in this lacuna in our store of knowledge and as a result would allow for long-range comparisons in this regard between (central) Europe and South Africa . The publisher was enthusiastic, but not being a specialist in the history of this country, let alone its languages, Tomek needed a partner in the venture. The renowned Zimbabwean sociolinguist and student of the cultural history of southern Africa, Finex Ndhlovu, agreed to join the project. At that point Palgrave suggested we would consider broadening the volume to the size of an encyclopedia of the political and social history of southern Africa’s all languages that would cover over 300 languages. Many prospective collaborators replied positively to this upgraded formula. In order to help us with various methodological and historical dilemmas that we expected would arise in due course, we decided to establish an advisory Editorial Council for the encyclopedia. We invited to it the two renowned linguists and historians of southern Africa, Felix Banda and Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, and from the European (western) end the two renowned historians keenly aware of the political and social importance of languages, namely, Peter Burke and Tony Judt. All kindly agreed to join the council, but untimely death did not allow the latter to observe the—however difficult—progress of this project.
We have to admit that we did not bother the Editorial Council with too many an issue, because we received around ten contributions in a quick succession and then the whole project stalled. It turned out that there were not enough scholars interested and able to write entries on the political and social history of the concerned languages. On the one hand, the expertise of how to ‘do it’ is still missing, while on the other, and even more impo...