The evolution of language fascinates me. English has a fascinating history. 1000 years ago Old English and Althochdeutch (Old High German) were almost interchangeable (AFAIK). The really fascinating part was the period after 1066 for several centuries where English wasn't the court language of England.
Now this period and lack of centralization is probably responsible for the many dialects (which now are mostly just different accents for other reasons). But the language changed so much over this period. Middle English is largely readable (but weird) to the modern reader. Old English is basically a different language.
In this period English lost of what I like to call the bullshit like gender of (non-person) nouns. Case of nouns (other than pronouns) also basically disappeared. It still had the formal/informal distinction of the second person that so many other European languages had (but we lost that later). Verbs and nouns became way more regular.
None of this happened with German (although Germany as a country didn't really exist until the 19th century and was at best a collection of city-states prior to that) but German in its various forms was still the ruling language (although Latin always had a certain preeminence what with the Holy Roman Empire and the Electors and all).
Compare modern German grammar (where nouns and adjectives have to agree with case, number, gender and article). It strongly suggests that the ruling class seems to embody conservatism and traditions, which is unsurprising given that the status quo is pretty good if you're the ruling class.
You see this in England where the precursor to modern French was the court language of England for hundreds of years. This has the effect of keeping commoners out (even more than they already are by virtue of hereditary title).
It's almost like without central control English became more democratized.
Obviously the printing press had a massive effect in standardizing spelling (other posters have mentioned that u and v were largely interchangeable).
Radio (and later TV) had a massive effect on standardizing pronunciation.
But still English has rapidly changed. One example I remember is if you go back and listen to early speeches by Churchill you'll here him say "nazi" not as "natsi" but as "nazzi" (much like the non-American ss in "aussie"). But by later in the war (IIRC) the "ts" phenom had pretty much been imported into English.
Another thing I read was the mathematical model for how verbs become regular [1]. Basically, the less a verb is used, the sooner it becomes regular but how long it takes is quite predictable. Apparently "to wed" is the next verb to become regular. "To be" should take about 44,000 years.
It makes you realize just how rapidly language changes and how grammar really is descriptive not prescriptive and why it's completely pointless to get your pedantic about "literally", less vs fewer, "very unique" and so on.
[1] http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2009/09/2...