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).

The purpose of this concluding chapter is twofold. The first is to distil the cross-cutting themes explored in the preceding chapters. The second is to provide a critique of what we call methodological tribalism (ethnicism). The western term 'tribalism' is largely a derogative description and evaluation, from without, of the dynamics of ethnic processes, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. In the second half of the nineteenth century, under the influence of social Darwinism, 'modern' (i.e., western) societies construed as 'nations' and encased in their own nation-states were opposed to 'premodern' and 'non-modern' (i.e., colonial, non-western) societies labelled disparagingly as 'tribes'. The former were proposed to be 'more civilized' and thus generally 'better' than the latter as 'primitive'.