In a way language is one of the only truly democratic institutions. We all vote for new words and new pronunciations by using them or not using them. The collective action of all these choices is the language.
For example, in the Mariana Islands, there are two independent othography committees that have been low-key duking it out over an indigenous language with less than 50k native speakers; see these brief highlights[1; p. 11 onward] from a recognized scholar of the language for a small sampling.
In the CNMI, the language is routinely spoken (i.e. English is a second language in most households) and the CNMI's othography committee has taken a conservative approach, focusing on simple written rules that capture sound as spoken, and biasing its orthography towards serving as an optimal language preservation mechanism...which makes objective sense given its target population is overwhelmingly fluent.
In Guam, however, the spoken language was nearing generational extinction largely driven by American colonial influence not dissimilar to the going concern of native Hawaiians. Ironically, Guam's better funded orthography committee has taken a much more liberal approach in establishing new written rules and spellings (e.g. CHamoru is the official spelling of the language/people written into law as of 2017; yes, the letter CH is now entirely capitalized in a proper noun; previously Chamoru, as opposed to the prevailing and historically consistent Chamorro in the CNMI).
There's also been a recent resurgence of language adoption by the native youth cohort on Guam largely motivated by grassroots sociopolitical identity movement. This hipster generation has taken it upon themselves to replace an ever growing number of established words adopted during colonial rule hundreds of years ago with all but forgotten words of the ancient tongue...which I suppose is fair game as language evolution goes, but it's gotten to a point of irony where these changes are throwing off the elder native-speaking generation responsible for passing on the language to their progeny, e.g. family (English) --> familia (Spanish adopted) --> manggåfa (antiquated is the new hip). In contrast, no such shift in zeitgeist is happening in the CNMI.
[1] https://people.ucsc.edu/~schung/orthog_differences.pdf#page=...
And there is no true way to "vote with your feet" if you get punished for violating the official orthography.
Not to mention other sources of non-organic language change, like e.g. suppressing dia- or sociolects, but I also don't want to delve (hehe) too far. :P
Ich hat das nicht verstanden. Ich kann mit meinem fusse wahlen.
Wie konnte ich fur schlecte Deutsch bestraft werden? Ich wohne nicht in Deutschland.
Und ja, meinem Deutsch ist sehr schlecht. Das stimmt. Kommen sie damit klar.
Edit: Fixed (without really improving) my terrible german.
(But the reason was people thinking it's a "Bildungshindernis", a roadblock in the pursuit of knowledge, like if people speaking dialect were mentally challenged - not national unity)