How Language Works David Crystal Allen Lane, the Penguin Press, 500pp, £22 ISBN 0140515380

David Crystal is the prophet par excellence of the English language. With this book he has set his sights high, aiming not to write a history of a language (as he did in The Stories of English), nor a synopsis of worldwide languages (as in his monumental Cambridge Encyclo-paedia of Language), but to show, in a single volume, how language works.

The task is not a small one. Asking how something works implies that it can be revealingly viewed as a mechanism - which is why it makes sense to ask how a clock works but not, say, a rose or a grasshopper. With language, there is simply too much going on for there to be a single answer. So Crystal is forced to jump from one thing to another, with the result that the thing never quite forms into a workable whole. Still, he is in good company in this respect: Noam Chomsky has aimed all his life to characterise the properties of language - the "abstract organ" that develops in us all - but in practice has mostly confined himself to the mechanism of sentence structure.

Crystal casts an engaging eye over the linguistic horizon, giving us the fruits of others' studies while building up an overarching framework into which most language questions fit. He wants to provide the interested non-expert with an outline of every major aspect of language as linguists understand it - rather as he might, say, in the course of a railway journey from London to Edinburgh.

He skips lightly but authoritatively from child language to sign language, from neurolinguistics to the numbering of dialects. He tells us how place names work, identifying the eponymous heroes Reada and Londinos behind Reading and London. He is particularly adept at using his learning to undercut pedantry - showing, for example, that those who spell the plural of volcano as volcano's are in good company (Dr Johnson's) and in touch with the true principles of English orthography even if, nowadays, they are in error.

As Crystal nears the end of his tour, a tone of moral urgency takes hold. A section entitled "Looking after Language" hammers home our duty to endorse linguistic diversity. In this context, Crystal's decision to take virtually all his examples from English - while understandable for reasons of clarity - seems odd: doesn't it contradict his pro-diversity message?

As with a conversation in a railway compartment, Crystal sometimes seems to be writing the whole thing off the top of his head. But it's a head that has been thinking about language for a long time, and his perceptions of the modern world are eagle-sharp. Who else recognised that the modernisation of Christian liturgy in 1960s English was a crisis in linguistic identity unmatched in scale?

Still, there are some frustrations. With so few references to actual linguists, readers may find it hard to follow up on what interests them. And although Crystal rightly claims to cover the subject matter of linguistics, those who sign up for a linguistics degree will find themselves in a very different world, where formal principles are viewed with a reverence usually reserved for love objects.

Then again, a glance back at this book may be their best reminder of why, whatever the best current theory, language itself, in all its variety, remains such an inexhaustible treasure chest.

Nicholas Ostler's Empires of the Word is published by HarperCollins

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