Neville Alexander, the great linguist, scholar of language policy and South African freedom fighter, was torn from this life while he was still working on the present volume. When he asked me to provide a preface for it I gladly agreed, not suspecting that it would also become a farewell to him.

Alexander did not think of language only as a system of lexical organisation and grammatical rules or as a mere tool of conversation. For him, languages, and particularly one's mother tongue, are intrinsically linked to cultural identities, intellectual abilities and the images we have of ourselves and our world. He knew that taking away one's mother tongue from the process of primary education would weaken the livelihood opportunities of the most vulnerable in a society: the children of the poor. Early mother tongue education became a top priority for him, especially in post-1994 South Africa. The legacies of apartheid would continue, he feared, without the creation of equal opportunities for all, based, among other things, on a non-discriminatory language policy. He fought knowledgeably and with passion for this goal, in word and deed. Despite the large gap his absence leaves in the community of social activists and scholars, his objectives, academic works and thoughts are still with us, not least in the chapters of this book.

The contributions to this volume present and discuss the language question as a challenge for peace. The issues raised could not be more topical today. Struggles over the skewed distribution of wealth and the realities of civil wars face us in the guise of conflicts over identity, expressed in terms of the meanings ascribed to kin, skin colour, religious faith and language, rather than through class and political ideologies, as was the case during the previous era of the Cold War. A new interest in language has emerged subsequent to the collapse of the East-West divide in 1989. It surfaced worldwide along with liberation and democratisation processes, rising migration flows as well as the denationalisation of communication and cultural boundaries. Disputes over language can be found not only in multilingual nation-states but also in cross-border regions and wider areas of supra-national integration such as the European Union. Language surfaces as a Janus-faced compound in these disputes; as a most effective and intelligible means of communication; and also as a means of affirming cultural embeddedness and personal identity.