Three things to comment on...
The origins of English: it's comes from about 1/3 Anglo-Saxon (Germanic), 1/3 Latin, and 1/3 French. Toilet, for example comes from French, where the more Germanic version would be the john.
Defence vs. Defense. "Defence" is the British spelling. "Defense" is the American spelling. As is often the case, Canadians are usually ok with either, although "defence" is the more common.
http://www3.telus.net/linguisticsiss...anAmerican.htm
Linguistically speaking, not only English, but all living languages are constantly changing. Linguistically, the purpose of language is to communicate an idea, so it doesn't matter if you use u, you, youze, etc, as long as the right concept is what is taken by the listener. Things like "Sutter resigns" and "Sutter re-signs" become a problem when the meaning isn't made clear by context.
"Proper" English is constantly changing, and not agreed upon by any two people, in my experience. Something to consider, though, is that it is only quite recently that there has been any such thing as standardized spelling. Compare any two middle-old English texts, and you'll note spelling differences between the two. Often, you'll even find the same word spelled different ways within one text. The one I particularly like is "ye olde...", which is just a ization of old ways of writing. It was always "the old...", but the "th" sound was made by a runic letter which is no longer used, and looked a bit like our "y". The "e" on the end of "olde" is simply their way of making the words like up, since there was no other way to make columns line up nicely.