Many sciences, including linguistics, assume the Uniformitarian Principle, which holds that the forces that apply today are the same forces that applied in prehistoric times. But language, unlike gravity and earthquakes, is a human attribute, and subject to acts of volition and intention. We should ask if modern social and cultural forces, which have altered cataclysmically in the last 200 years, might have an impact on contemporary language change as never before. I will review changes in mobility, life expectancy, mass communications, literacy, urbanization and mass media. I will then look closely at two of these, mass media and mass literacy, for evidence of influence on the way languages vary and change.