The paper presents several grammatical processes of change revealed by recent studies of the Brown family corpora: grammaticalization, colloquialization, Americanization, democratization, densification of content, and analyticization. Grammaticalization transforms lexical items into functional ones, e.g. shall, needn’t, the semi-modals, want to, the progressive, the get- passive. Colloquialization, or the shifting to a more informal speech-like style, is illustrated mainly by the increased presence of questions in general, and non-sentential ones in particular, and that of contracted verbal forms. Americanization, sometimes considered an aspect of colloquialization, is a reflection of changing norms in personal relations and can be identified in the decline of  the verb have used as a finite main verb, in the preference for will over shall, and the widespread use of have got and of the mandative subjunctive. Democratization replaces expressions of distance and social asymmetry by expressions of equality, detectable in the avoidance of gender-biased language forms, such as the use of pronouns. Densification of content compacts meaning into a smaller number of words, is typical of news and scientific writing, and can be seen in the higher frequency of long noun phrases and ‘s genitive constructions. Analyticization, the shift towards periphrastic forms, can be evinced in some forms of comparison of the adjective.