Every alphabet in the world has its own secret committee to oversee all the letters (upper and lower case), numbers, symbols and glyphs – down to the dots on the i and j (called tittles) – that make up a full alphabet are properly protected, represented and cared for.

These committees or consortiums aren’t run by humans, but by the letters themselves, in a sort of democratic fashion. Obviously A-Z in capital letters think they’re the bees knees – and tend to shout the LOUDEST – but all the characters are said to be equal and all contribute to create the written language.

We will focus on the Modern English Alphabet Consortium (MEAC) but there are obviously hundreds, from Arabic, Chinese and Ethiopic to Japanese, Kemer and Cyrillic. Even so-called obsolete or dead languages are in fact still functioning with their consortiums, albeit in a limited capacity. Sumerian (whose people were the first civilisation to invent a system of writing, cuneiform – a fact they haven’t stopped harping on about for at least the last four millennia; though more modern alphabets usually retort that cuneiform isn’t even a proper language or alphabet, which tends to shut them up), Akkadian, Sanskrit and Ancient Egyptian are just a few of the old languages who still flourish for a variety of reasons, such as liturgy or academia.

Examples of ancient languages created in clay, papyrus or illuminated manuscripts feature in museums and libraries. Their consortiums get excited when their language features – albeit fleetingly and superficially – in a TV series or blockbuster movie, like Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs in Stargate or The Mummy. The hieroglyphs still like to party like it’s 3000 BCE (yeah, and when they were doing so, some migrant workers mining for turquoise in the Sinai desert were creating the first proper alphabet, the Proto-Sinaitic script. Well, that’s what they claim anyway. Then the Phoenicians chime in that they developed it. As you can guess, the hieros, protos and phoenies aren’t exactly the best of friends).

Anyway, the modern English alphabet is Latin in origin and has 26 letters. But it didn’t always have. And it wasn’t even created in alphabetical order – something J will delight in telling: he actually came last (in 1525), a wee baby. Indeed, he was a bit of cry baby at first, questioning his existence, until in June 1632 when a consortium character managed to insert the word Jesus (with a J for the first time) into an English legal brief, and the rest is history. Until J got bored again four hundred years later. The consortium then came up with Jay-Z, which pleased J (and Z too. A wasn’t bothered, he’s way popular anyway, and Y wasn’t impressed with the music).

Every character has a story to tell. The letter A has been around since the Phoenician period and its symbol derives from the shape of an ox head, when it appeared upside down. The letter O is unchanged since 1300BC. Well, he quips, you can’t alter perfection. The ampersand – the & symbol – will start reminiscing about the time he was actually part of the alphabet: he used to come last, after Z. Now he contents himself with being in the middle of poncy logos, like Dolce & Gabbana.

It was by the late 1500s that letters such as X and Z were feeling ignored in the western alphabet; X in particular was pretty depressed and would go on and on about Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755, which states on page 2308 that the letter X “begins no word in the English language”. X was prone to outbursts of anger: in fact he would get very cross.

So it was decided to give X a boost; in 1588 the first ever dictionary transliterating Chinese into Roman characters was devised, with a large number of words beginning with X. X was pleased. For a while. But he seemed to always have a cross to bear.

Feeling yet again sorry for X, the consortium gave him, in 1883, the novel Treasure Island, which contained the first use of X on a treasure map, and would pass into common lore for X marking the spot. A few years later they gave him X-ray too (don’t mention X-rated movies, he’s sensitive).

Other letters, seeing what the consortium had done for X over the years, also kicked up a stink, with variable results. Well, they gave K the Cornish language, and for Y they invented Welsh. The letter T got a boost with the word T-shirt, first appearing for him in print in 1920, in an F Scott Fitzgerald novel, This Side of Paradise. But W still can’t believe his luck by appearing three times before every website url (outsiders believe some nepotism was involved) when the consortium invented the World Wide Web, not realising how it would take off.

It must be said the consortium has a love-hate relationship with humans. Obviously, they need them, to read, write and use their letters. But most of them think that humans are morons. Luckily, this means their will is easy to bend, and the consortium can introduce half-baked ideas, like social media or the QWERTY keyboard, and humans will take to them like cream to coffee.

Despite much internal bickering through the centuries, there have been times in history when all the characters have been happy. When the consortium invented paper, writing instruments, the printing press, fonts, books, magazines, newspapers, Scrabble, typewriters, keyboards, smart phones – all the characters were pretty happy and evenly distributed.

But by the end of the 20th century, some symbols were beginning to feel marginalised (many weren’t even featured on a keyboard and were literally hidden characters, known unofficially as shady characters in the consortium) and obsolete.

Despite its earliest use being found in 1345, and frequently used in accounting and commerce for invoices abbreviations, meaning “at a rate of”, by the 1970s the @ sign was protesting loudly and widely about its decline. Feeling the pressure, the consortium invented email for the at symbol, which he was pretty happy with.

However, that opened the floodgates for a whole wave of protests from the other symbols, most vocally the hashtag (officially known as the octothorpe and born in 1971; its origin is disputed, just how the consortium likes it). The consortium, who actually just want a peaceful, happy life, shrugged and invented social media for the hashtag, who got very over-excited about it.

There’s always been something cloak and dagger (†) and double dagger (‡) about the symbols used to indicate a footnote or proofreading marks for removing dubious matter. It’s like they’re always trying to stab someone in the back.

Who knows what the future holds? Even the vowels, who thought their roles sacred, get left out in text messages (pls, thx) and the notion that words in general can be more efficient and quicker to read without vowels have made them very nervous indeed.

But this is the way language goes, it changes and evolves (devolves, say some). There are always winners and losers. Twelve letters were left out of the the modern alphabet, including Thorn, (pronounced ‘th’, derived from the Old English runic alphabet, Futhark), Ash and Eth. They’ve been feeling dejected for hundreds of years. But who knows, like the # and the @ symbols, they could make a comeback one day.