Chapter 0. Introduction and Overview about their (ethnic) diversity? Is the agglomeration of different cultural, religious or language groups just as unequivocally seen as something exceptional, deserving of protection and conservation? Dalby (2003) believes that 2,500 languages are likely to be lost over this century. With less than 7,000 living languages in the world listed by the Ethnologue project (Lewis, 2009), this heavily impacts the diversity of global languages. However, to assess the values of any of these lost languages is equally hard to assess as the loss of any species to biodiversity. 4 So, is ethnic diversity as threatened as biodiversity? 5 Until the 20th century, the ethnic composition of countries was more associated with established nation states. In this regard, ethnicity was more a unifying factor than one that posed any threat of conflict. Over the course of history, however, the concepts of nation states and ethnic diversity became diametrical ones. Since then, there have been many negative, despotic, nationalistic eras in history, but also constant positive examples of coexistence. These alleged opposing extremes culminated when Huntington (1993) proclaimed the 'clashes of civilizations'. In his view of a post Cold War era, the ideology driven conflict of that time is replaced by cultural and religious clashes between global civilizations. The rather random division of the world into eight civilizations on whose borders conflicts are supposed to arise, has drawn a lot of criticism. 6 Having eight civilizations is indeed a very superficial classification that fails to take the ethnic setup and internal dynamics within these civilizations into account. What's more, not only are these civilizations diverse, but also the countries within them, which all differ in their levels of diversity. Increased mobility, economically and socially, has fueled ethnic diversity, for example, in Europe. If these dynamics stretch the European 4 Admittedly, the extinction of languages, even major ones, is anything but new. Latin, the language of the Roman Empire, is one of the most prominent examples. On the contrary, the evolution of languages also created new ones. The Romance languages that evolved from the common Latin origin and various Creole languages, through mixing with the languages of colonizers, are such examples. If one does not assign, for example, language diversity any intrinsic value, the disappearance of a language is just the result of its instrumental value dropping insofar as it no longer fulfills its speaker's socioeconomic needs (Mufwene, 2005).