With your books and TV programmes, you have become a leading authority on the English language. What sparked your interest in this subject?

I think it’s impossible not to be interested in language. People often deny this, but you can get into a fantastic argument with just about anybody by talking about language. I find myself continually talking to my barber, taxi drivers and people I meet on the train. I tell them what I do and the books I have written, and they pull a face as if to say that all sounds quite boring. But within two minutes I’m locked in an argument with them about whether English has deteriorated, or whether the Americans have ruined English or whether Chinese is going to influence English. Everybody is interested in this subject.

It probably helped, with me, that I was an only child. I had parents who were very interested in language. My mother was a linguist and my father was a barrister. They were both linguistically punctilious. My mother spoke four or five languages and from a pretty early age I had this inculcated in me. But I defy you to find anybody who is not interested in the language that they speak and the underlying issues to do with how language works.

You have said that there are a lot of falsehoods uttered about English. What do you mean by that?

There are lots of water cooler myths about the language. One of the things people tend to say is that this is a uniquely sad moment in the history of English – that it’s all going to hell in a handcart. But actually, if you look at the history of the language, people have always been saying things like that. The moment we live in is not uniquely sad. It is simply the moment we are living in and we feel it very profoundly; there is something quite alienating about being caught up in the experience of change.

It may be that the technologies that are available to us in the area of communication are making changes happen more quickly than they did in the past. But the suggestion that the English language is somehow on the way out or is doomed to become less rich is nonsense, and is fuelled by people who have a political agenda for saying that. Most arguments about any language, and certainly about English, are actually arguments about other things like morality, class and political values. Language is something people find easy to address as a subject because everybody else has experience of it. Also, the “problems” of language are easier to address than the problems of society. So it becomes a way of mounting a flank attack on other serious issues.

There are loads of stupid myths about the English language. One of the things you hear, as I touched on a moment ago, is that the Americans are ruining English or that American English is worse. This is just an absurd thing to say. First of all, the things that people most complain about in American usage in many cases actually used to be standard British usage. Plus, one of the reasons that English is such an important world language is because of America’s political and cultural might in the 20th century. In some ways British people have benefited from that. So to sneer at America and American English seems to me to be incredibly short-sighted.

It could be argued that the quality of writing both in novels and in the media is of a higher standard in America than it is in Britain.

I would say that is true up to a point. That’s not to denigrate British writers and publications, but a lot of the writers and publications that excite me are American. I was introduced as a teenager to The New Yorker by my grandfather, who had lived in Chicago during the prohibition years and had become a massive Americanophile – if that doesn’t sound too weird. I have been reading it now for over 20 years. When my copy of The New Yorker turns up, I drop everything in order to devour it. I don’t think we have anything like that in Britain. That’s partly to do with the demise or decline of print media. The New Yorker is very much sticking to the principle that people will pay for quality journalism. A lot of journalism in this country and in the US has adopted the reverse approach of becoming more crass almost as a reaction to losing sales, and trying to claw back market share. I love the production values of The New Yorker. I love the idea that they have fact checkers. It’s a very small point, but there is a sense to me that American literary culture is tremendously rich – and you denigrate that at your peril.

You have touched on this also, but many people make a link between the usage and teaching of English and moral decline and breakdown in society.

People use complaints about language as a way of addressing delicate issues in an oblique fashion. You look pretty ridiculous – in fact you sound a bit like [historian] David Starkey – if you start saying swingeing things about the changing fabric of modern cultural Britain. But if you talk about the decline of the apostrophe you will immediately have lots of allies. So it’s often a way of dealing obliquely with the way that change makes people feel uncomfortable.

I’m all for people in schools being taught grammar and a concept of how written English ought ideally to be. I think you get taught a set of rules and then you learn to abuse them – that’s part of what linguistic facility is. It’s about going beyond competence and understanding when you can violate conventions. We talk about rules but it really is more sensible to talk about conventions. The point is that these things will change. Language changes. That’s the fundamental fact that language rests upon. It would be really weird if language didn’t change, because people and society change. But there is this persistent desire to embalm language for all eternity. You get that in people, for instance, who say there should be a language academy here [in the UK].

They have one in France, don’t they? Although it’s often remarked that by the time they have made a ruling on a particular word its meaning has changed, and that everyone ignores what they say anyway.

Why should one respect the authority of an organisation of that nature? People say that the Académie Française exists mainly for the amusement of foreign journalists. It can feel like that. The other issue here is to do with what one might call English, or perhaps British, national character. We don’t like top-down government. So I think an institution of that kind would be doomed to failure here. We tend to ignore pronouncements that come from on high.

You can imagine what sort of people would think they should be in this organisation, and what sort of people would actually be in it. There is a disparity between the two. It’s quite common for people to think the way they use English is the best way. Everybody thinks that the ideal academy would be one that would have them in it, yet this is not actually going to be the case. And if it was professional linguists, well, one of the things to remember about professional linguists is that they tend to be very liberal about issues of correctness and grammatical nicety. So the edicts they might hand down might not be the edicts that the people lobbying for an academy would want to take on board.

Before we move onto your five books, I did notice that you once wrote a short book called How To Really Talk About Books You Haven’t Read. I trust you are not about to give us a masterclass?

That book is an outlier in my work. I have written three books about language and that was a little novelty item. The first thing to say about the five books that I have chosen is that they are very much not about the issue of linguistic correctness. They’re books I’ve come across in my general reading about language that I think are really interesting, and are dealing with slightly different things from the ones I tend to be occupied with. One of them is very well known, the others much less so. I think a couple of them deserve to be a lot better known.