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I believe that every widely-spoken language must have gone through a process of official reform in some point of its history. My two favorite examples are those of the Turkish Language reform, and Arabic Script developement.

Turkish language reforms were initiated under the leadership of the founder of modern-day Turkey, Kamal Mustapha Ataturk. Before the reforms, I believe that it was Ottoman Turkish that was more prevelant. Under Kamal Mustapha, a lot of Arabic and Farsi words were replaced with words that conveiged the same meaning but came from Turkic origins.

Another part of that reform was the use of the Latin Alphabet instead of the Arabic Alphabet.

A less drastic, but also revolutionary was the addition of dots and short vowels in the Arabic Alphabet. Before then, there were entirely different letters that looked identical, and reading reading Arabic needed a great effort, while learning it was even more challenging. Interestingly, the main reason these reforms occured were mainly for religious reasons, speciffically to make Qur'anic recitation much easir.

Here's an example:

ححر in the old script can be any of the following words:

حجر (HaJaR: stone)
جحر (JuHR: a burrow)
حجز (HaJZ: to reserve, or detain)

In this case, the letters حـ (Haa') and جـ (Jeem) differ only in one dot
Also, the letters ـر (Raa') and ـز (Zein) differ the same way...

I remember trying to read old Arabic manuscripts and engravings that didn't have any dots, and that made it VERY difficult to read xp

Of course, seeing phrases I am already familliar with was helpful, I have to admit...

There are many other examples everywhere in thw world. Anyone personally know of more?

The Norwegian/Danish letter Åå to be in place of aa, however on some names of cities/towns they will keep the aa

ex.

Århus/Aarhus (a city in Denmark)
Aalborg (another city in Denmark)

på -in/on/by (paa) ex: På engelsk (in english)

Også-also/too (ogsaa)

Nå-now (naa)

In mainland china, there was a large simplification fo many of the chinese chatacters, I assume to promote literacy.

For example-

馬 to 马
鳥 - 鸟
飯 - 饭

And similar ones. Though the traditional ones are still used in hong kong, taiwan, and to an extent Japan. Though in the meiji era, japan did some of its own character simplifications, some of which the chinese copied or something, but for some reason, many of their simplified versions are simlar.

For example, In Japan and China, a particular character that my computer can't type became 学　in both languages. I don't know why. There is more to it, but I'm no historian.

The dots in ü, ä, and ö (and perhaps some other letters) used in nordic European languages like German and Swedish, used to be an e after the letter. For example, Goethe and Göthe is the same.

The first change was to move the e onto the top of - for example - the a, and make it smaller. Later it was simplified to double dots.

Likewise, the ring in å used to be an o after the a.

in italian, the "i lunga" ("long i") was what they called a "j." and the j, like modern day german and many eastern european languages, was used as a "y" sound. so words such as ieri (yesterday, pronounced: yeri) used to be spelled jeri. So in words such as Io, the j would not have been in place of the i, because the i isnt being used to make y sound.