Short answers, pulled from the story.
Speakers of Scandinavian Germanic dialects settled in parts of Britain during the eighth and ninth centuries. This migration introduced a significant grammatical simplification to the Anglo-Frisian core of English.
Words such as pork and beef stem from Old Norman speakers who developed Anglo-Norman after the eleventh-century invasion. In contrast, words like swine describe animals bred by occupied Anglo-Saxons while intellectual terms often contain Latin and French influences derived from the Normans.
The adjective wee is almost exclusively used in parts of Scotland, north-east England, and Northern Ireland. Elsewhere in the United Kingdom, the adjective little remains predominant.
The printing press introduced to England in the middle of the fifteenth century enabled William Caxton to disperse common spelling at a much faster rate. This development helped establish Standard dialect usage which created class distinctions among those who did not speak it.
Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1755 and marked a large step in spelling reform. By the early twentieth century, British authors produced numerous books intended as guides to grammar and usage including Fowler's Modern English Usage.
In May 2007 the Arts and Humanities Research Council awarded a grant to Leeds to study British regional dialects. The team sifted through examples of regional slang words and phrases turned up by the Voices project run by the BBC.