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In evolutionary linguistics (not to be confused with biolinguistics) (Steels 2011), languages are considered as complex systems adapting to the niche occupied by the speech community (Christiansen & Chater 2008; Lupyan & Dale 2010; Bentz & Christiansen 2013). In this talk, I will look at how grammar is shaped by demographic factors. Instead of taking a broad-spectre typological view, comparing large language samples, like Lupyan & Dale (2010) or Bentz & Winter (2013), I take a close-up view at differences between West-Germanic languages. The focus will be on the strong and weak preterite formation, a popular topic in diachronic morphology (Lieberman et al. 2007; Carroll et al. 2012; Cuskley et al. 2014). Evidence will be drawn from historical grammars, corpus data and agent-based simulation (see Pijpops et al. 2015). Our results show that demographic turmoil co-determiners both the nature and the speed of change. Bentz, C. & M.H. Christiansen. 2013. ‘Linguistic adaptation: the trade-off between case marking and fixed word orders in Germanic and Romance languages’. In: F. Shi & G. Peng (eds.), Eastward flows the great river. Festschrift in honor of Prof. William S-Y. Wang on his 80th birthday. Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong Press. 48-56. Bentz, C. & B. Winter. 2013. ‘Languages with more second language learners tend to lose nominal case’. Language Dynamics and Change 3: 1-27. Christiansen, M.H. & N. Chater. 2008. 'Language as shaped by the brain'. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 31(5): 489-509. Carroll, R., R. Svare & J. Salmons. 2012. ‘Quantifying the evolutionary dynamics of German verbs’. Journal of Historical Linguistics 2(2): 153-172. Cuskley, C., M. Pugliese, C. Castellano, F. Colaiori, V. Loreto & F. Tria. 2014. ‘Internal and external dynamics in language: evidence from verb regularity in a historical corpus of English’. PLoS ONE: 9(8): e102882. Lieberman, E., J.-B. Michel, J. Jackson, T. Tang & M. Nowak. 2007. ‘Quantifying the evolutionary dynamics of language’. Nature 449(7163): 713-716. Lupyan, G. & R. Dale. 2010. ‘Language structure is partly determined by social structure’. PLoS ONE 5(1). Pijpops, D, K. Beuls & F. Van de Velde. 2015. ‘The rise of the verbal weak inflection in Germanic. An agent-based model’. Computational Linguistics in the Netherlands Journal 5: 81-102. Steels, L. 2011. ‘Modeling the cultural evolution of language’. Physics of Life Review 8: 339-356