This volume contains a contemporary, integrated description of the
processes of language. These range from fast scales (fractions of a
second) to slow ones (over a million years). The contributors, all
experts in their fields, address language in the brain, production of
sentences and dialogues, language learning, transmission and
evolutionary processes that happen over centuries or millenia, the
relation between language and genes, the origins of language,
self-organization, and language competition and death. The book as a
whole will help to show how processes at different scales affect each
other, thus presenting language as a dynamic, complex and profoundly
human phenomenon.