Geoffrey Sampson is Professor of Natural Language Computing at the University of Sussex. He has held positions at SOAS and LSE and at the universities of Oxford, Lancaster, and Leeds, where he was Professor of Linguistics from 1985-1990. His recent books include Empirical Linguistics and The 'Language Instinct' Debate (Continuum 2001 and 2005), and Love Songs of Early China (Shaun Tyas, 2006).
David Gil is Scientific Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. He has held positions at UCLA, the University of Tel Aviv, and at the National University of Singapore. He is co-editor of The World Atlas of Language Structure (OUP, 2005) and author of numerous articles in journals such as Linguistic Inquiry and Linguistics.
Peter Trudgill is Professor Emeritus of English Linguistics at the University of Fribourg. He previously held chairs at the Universities of Lausanne, Essex, and Reading. He is also Adjunct Professor at La Trobe University, Adjunct Professor at Agder University, and Honorary Professor at the University of East Anglia. His books include Dialects in Contact (Blackwell, 1986), Sociolinguistics (fourth edition, Penguin 2000), and New-dialect formation: on the inevitability of colonial Englishes (Edinburgh, 2004).

Geoffrey Sampson, University of Sussex
David Gil, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Peter Trudgill, University of Fribourg
Walter Bisang, Germany
Ngoni Chipere, University of The West Indies
Östen Dahl , Stockholm University
Guy Deutscher, Leiden University
Daniel Everett, Illinois State University
John A. Hawkins, Research Centre for English Applied Linguistics, Cambridge
Fred Karlsson, University of Helsinki
Bernd Kortmann, University of Freiburg
Utz Mass, FB Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft Universität
John McWhorter, Manhattan Institute for Policy Research
Matti Miestamo, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies
Johanna Nichols, University of California, Berkeley
Ljiljana Progovac, Wayne State University
Kaius Sinnemäki, University of Helsinki
Eugenie Stapert, UK
Benedikt Szmrecsanyi, University of Freiburg

"This edited volume can serve as a first introduction to the issue of language complexity, but also as an update for those who are more familiar with the research. The papers are well-written and although definitions vary widely, they are made explicit in each chapter. In fact, the variety of ways in which linguistic complexity is investigated makes the case against equal complexity across languages much more compelling than any of the individual work would by itself." --Linguist List

"Interesting and provocative." --Anthropological Linguistics