The colonial era changed the history of language in Southern Africa forever. Throughout the long multilingual history of the African continent, African languages have been subject to events like language contact, language expansion, language shift, and language death. A case in point is the Bantu expansion, in which Bantu-speaking peoples expanded over most of Sub-Saharan Africa, thereby displacing Khoi-San speaking peoples in much of East Africa . Another example is the Islamic expansion in the 7th century AD, which led to the extension of Arabic to much of North Africa. Colonialism played a major part in language expansion when different European countries claimed these new lands even forming new languages.
Information about two of the most popular languages in Southern Africa:
After gaining independence, many African countries, in the search for national unity, selected one language (generally the former colonial language) to be used in government and education. In recent years, African countries have become increasingly aware of the importance of linguistic diversity. Language policies that are being developed nowadays are mostly aimed at multilingualism. These policies are form this way to include major groups of people.
Current major Southern African countries' and their official languages:
[Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License], . (n.d.). Southern Africa. In World Regional Geography: People, Places and Globalization. Retrieved from http://open.lib.umn.edu/worldgeography/chapter/7-6-southern-africa/