It might not be a coincidence that a small torrent of books on the English language should come along all at once. Nor that one of them, Lynne Truss's trim essay on punctuation, Eats, Shoots and Leaves (Profile, £9.99), should turn out to be this year's surprise Christmas hit. At a time when most of the debates about national identity trip over quarrelling notions of racial, religious and ethnic rights, we stand in urgent need of ground on which all the varieties of modern Briton can meet. In the past, Britishness was presented as a matter of blood and birthright, as a racial characteristic - but this is no longer tenable. So the appearance of such works is a reminder that the binding agent in our national life is our language. We speak, therefore we are. In their different but complementary ways, these books describe the extent to which our entire culture, its triumphs and its iniquities, is inscribed in the words we use every day.
In The Adventure of English: the biography of a language (Hodder & Stoughton, £20), Melvyn Bragg takes the high road and strides confidently through the origins and growth of English, from the Celtic-Roman-Germanic stew of early times, past Chaucer and Shakespeare, through global exploration and American improvisation and out into the modern world where it emerges as Singlish (Singaporean English) or Taglish (Tagalog and English, as spoken in Sri Lanka). The project began life as a series of radio programmes, so it is concise as well as learned. In making English the heroic protagonist of an adventure, however, Bragg may personify it too crisply for some tastes. "As English spread," he writes, "it began to chafe at the bonds and then to cut loose." Such Frankensteinian imagery overlooks the extent to which language remains the servant of those who use it. Bragg sees it as a wild and wilful beast, dragging its hapless owner behind it; but a language, as someone once remarked, is only dialect with a navy.
Still, it gives us an impressive and sage view of the big picture. Bragg leaves it to others to inspect the finer points. And in The Meaning of Everything: the story of the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford University Press, £12.99), Simon Winchester finds himself awed by the stupendous nature of such a task. These days, our idea of a major project is a millennial theme park; a hundred years ago, people had grander aspirations. It has often been fashionable to mock Victorians for their strait-laced and narrow ways, but the OED was a momentous task - the "greatest enterprise in history" indeed. At its launch party in 1928, the three-times prime minister Stanley Baldwin surveyed the ten volumes (an amazing 15,490 pages, 414,825 words and 1,861,200 illustrative quotations) and said: "Our histories, our novels, our poems, they are all in this one book." It was true. It had taken 70 years to compile the OED, an extraordinary communal effort in which a large team of contributors read, amassed and arranged the component parts of English literature and culture from A to Z.
Winchester tells the story with an attentive and precise sense of decorum. The first editor, Herbert Coleridge, put up an oak bookshelf with 54 pigeonholes, slightly underestimating the amount of space needed to house the six million quotations that would eventually be gathered. As the work proceeds, inch by inch, line by line, column by column, the full nature of the Sisyphean task swims into focus: the language is a moving target, shifting and alive. By the time the task was finished, it would be time to start again. The team that created the OED were like valiant farmers getting in the harvest during a storm. "The English language has a centre," John Murray wrote in his celebrated introduction, "but no discernible circumference."
Are mere words the centre, however? David Sacks, in keeping with the modern appetite for microscopic investigation, has produced a genial companion to the DNA from which our words are formed in The Alphabet (Hutchinson, £12.99). Each letter, in his hands, comes thickly encrusted with cultural history. The Q, he insists, is a "success story", a once-marginal letter that has been thrust into the limelight by modern marketing; the E is the industrious worker bee, especially in the era of e-commerce ("E is everywhere"). Sacks has elaborate but straight-faced fun with all the letters, stroking them like pets, aware of the mosaic of associations that clings to each one of them: B, for instance, sounds harmonious to a musician, healthy to a nutritionist, second-rate to an examiner and rubbish to a film critic. He also ranges freely over the Greek, Phoenician and Etruscan roots of our own linguistic building blocks, and compares them with their rivals in other languages. Our 26 letters are dwarfed by the 2,000 symbols in everyday Chinese, for instance, which explains why it takes Chinese children three years longer to learn to read than western pupils.
Not that we can afford to think even of the alphabet as being set in stone. It has accepted newcomers in the past (the Romans managed without J, V and W - the J didn't land in English until the 17th century). Indeed, Bragg finds room at the end of his book to mention the challenge English faces from the abbreviated vocabulary of texting. Or should that be txtng? A decade ago, Steven Pinker noted, in his exhilarating account of human civilisation, The Language Instinct, that our brains were wired such that it was pxrfxctly pxssxblx, xndxxd nxtxrxl, tx rxxd wxrds wxthxxt vxwxls, and now it looks as though modern tchnlgy mght wll bnsh thm ltgthr. To enthusiasts, this is clearly the way 4ward, though how gr8 it is may be another matter. It is not a complete novelty: shorthand swept away vowels, replaced consonants with squiggles much stranger than anything on a new-generation mobile - and is itself now nearly obsolete. And as it happens, English is already stingy with vowels, requiring them to perform frequent somersaults to cover the much wider range of sounds they are supposed to represent (consider no, ton and old). Sometimes they get confused and overlap (as in fun/son or on/wan). To Sacks (and others), this is all part of language's suggestive allure.
Where Bragg gives us the view from the dress circle, Truss crawls across the stage on her knees, looking for the stage directions that keep the show on the road. The result, an affable moan about the modern world's lack of respect for time-honoured punctuation marks, has been flying out of the shops in its thousands - or, as she would hate us to write, in it's thousand's. Books still make good Christmas presents, partly because they are easy to wrap - so this one may well appear in a stocking near you. It is not hard to see why. It is a one-gulp summary of a slippery subject. Truss serves up pedantry without pain, wraps her plea for grammatical accuracy in sweet coating and does not believe that "old" is a synonym for "old-fashioned". She rides the powerful public assumption that things aren't what they used to be, and distances herself from more forbidding members of the language police by declaring herself merely "an average stickler" - one for whom the subordinate clause "will always be one of Santa's little helpers". The result is a winning tribute to the idea that English has spent thousands of years accreting its wrinkles, resonances and associations. They often lie dormant, but our daily conversations, spoken or written, still shimmer with the poetry of the past. It will take more than a hot text life to stop this in its tracks.
Robert Winder is writing a book about immigration
