Introduction.-Neurobiology: Language by, in, through and across the brain -- Dialogue -- Learning: Statistical mechanisms in language acquisition -- Evolution:  Language use and the evolution of languages -- Transitions: The evolution of linguistic replicators -- Genes: Interactions with language on three levels -- Language in Nature: On the evolutionary roots of a cultural phenomenon -- Self-Organization: Complex dynamical systems in the evolution of speech -- Environment: Language ecology and language death -- Conclusions.

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.