A tumblr screencap came up in my social media feed claiming the following:
“I used to be a spelling and grammar freak until I took a course on ‘History of the English Language’.
When English spelling was standardised, the dictionary writers LITERALLY made the rules of “Proper English” super fucking hard on purpose because they didn’t want “the wrong sort of people” (ie 90% of English speakers) to be able to pass themselves off in high society
That’s why English has so many bullshit grammar rules that make no sense about double negatives and split infinitives and stuff. To make sure that only people with years of training in the nonsensical and arbitrary rules of ‘proper speech’ could speak ‘properly’ “
This idea would fit with my own personal left wing bias but actually how accurate is this claim?
I can't speak for the reasons why "Latin-esque" rules such as split infinitives were added. At any rate, these days, such rules are more guidelines than hard and fast commandments, and indeed, in English, it's acceptable to split an infinitive for emphasis. (Eg. "We need to pay quickly and leave" sounds less urgent than "We need to quickly pay and leave.")
I will say that the exact opposite to what you propose happened with American English in the 19th Century. Noah Webster lobbied hard to simplify American spelling; a lot of spelling differences between American English and British English are due to his work. (Words such as "Color" instead of "Colour" are examples of his simplification.) As Gertrude Hildreth put it in her article "Noah Webster: Crusader for American Literacy," he used his Blue-Back Speller and famous dictionary to remove class distinctions in American English and to promote literacy. (Hildreth 375) By standardizing and simplifying spelling, he hoped to ensure that rural and frontier Americans spoke and read the same language as those in the cities. "[He] was zealous in his campaign to regularize orthography of the American language and to simplify spelling where this was practical. He recognized that with correct and consistent orthography much time that children spent in learning to read and write could be saved." (Hildreth 375) Karl F Kaestle writes in a review of E. Jennifer Monaghan's A Common Heritage: Noah Webster's Blue-Back Speller that Webster sought to create a distinct and uniform American English, and that many of his rules for simplifying the way it was written and illustrating how it was pronounced are still used today. (Kaestle 659) There were political reasons for this as well; he was an ardent Federalist, and while he didn't want frontier parts of America and its territories cut off (areas typically associated with Jeffersonian Democrats), he also didn't want them to gain too much leverage, either. But by and large, he wished to simplify the language to make it easier to learn and read. In fact, there were many other simplified spellings of his that failed to catch on.
EDIT: Added a phrase for clarification of my point.
Sources:
Hildreth, Gertrude, "Noah Webster Crusader for American Literacy," The Elementary School Journal, Vol. 59, No. 7 (Apr., 1959), pp. 375-379
Kaestle, Carl F, "A Common Heritage: Noah Webster's Blue-Back Speller," Journal of American History, Dec 1983, Vol. 70 Issue 3, p659-660