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).