Religion often lies at the root of conflict between different cultural groups. People are less willing to tolerate or accept differences in religious matters than in any other aspect of culture. Religion can be defined as a set of beliefs and practices, through which people seek mental and physical harmony with the powers of the universe, through which they attempt to influence and accommodate the awesome forces of nature, life, and death. The most important cultural glue is language that component of human cultures that binds like-speakers together. At the same time, a great variety of languages can serve to keep groups of people distinct and separate from other groups using a different language.
Language is the most common variable by which cultural groups are identified.
It provides the means by which learned customs and skills pass from one generation to the next. Because languages vary spatially, they reinforce the sense of region and space. A person may voluntarily change their religion, but not their language. Languages are tongues that cannot be mutually understood, differing from dialects variant forms of a language that have not lost mutual comprehension. Some 6,500 languages, and many more dialects, are spoken by human- kind today.