Chinese is actually a collective term for a group of languages. The standard language in China is the dialect of Beijing and surroundings, known abroad as Mandarin or Mandarin Chinese (after the former governing elite who spoke it). With 900 million speakers, it is by far the most spoken language in the world. A total of 1.4 billion people speak a variant of Chinese as their mother tongue. Chinese has unique features, such as character writing and the importance of pitch for the meaning of words.

The Chinese languages belong to the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. This is only one of the many dozens of language families in the world. A language family is an umbrella covering all sorts of language groups. Dutch belongs to the Indo-European family. Although counting them is difficult . the distinction between language and dialect is not clearly defined . the number of living languages at the moment is estimated to be at least six thousand.

Languages give an impression of the cultural wealth the world has to offer, but languages can also be a source of conflict. In Belgium, the language boundary between Flemish and Walloon is a divisive element in society. In many places in the world, minority languages are threatened with extinction. To call a halt to this irreversible cultural loss, Unesco has drawn up a Red List of Endangered Languages. No less than three thousand languages are on the point of extinction because the number of speakers is now very small. Even in Europe there are endangered languages requiring extra attention, such as Frisian, Basque and Yiddish (the latter language has hardly any speakers left).

Several years ago, Unesco began mapping oral and immaterial heritage, such as dialects, festive rituals, theatrical forms, traditional crafts or unique indigenous knowledge of nature. In the Netherlands, the Meertens Institute and the Dutch Centre for Popular Culture are working on this. In the past, there was a tendency in the Netherlands to look down on local folklore, but there is now increasing interest in and recognition of the variety of cultural customs in the Netherlands and abroad. Attachment to a community, to one.s environment and to shared cultural traditions appears to be of crucial importance to people's well-being.