If u really r annoyed by the vocabulary of the text generation, then a new exhibition at the British Library should calm you down. It turns out they were doing it in the 19th century – only then they called it emblematic poetry, and it was considered terribly clever.

Details were announced today of the library's new exhibition devoted to the English language, exploring its 1,500-year history from Anglo-Saxon runes and early dictionaries to not dropping your Hs and rap.

The exhibition will open this winter after three years of planning.

One of the stars of the show will be the oldest surviving copy of Beowulf, the longest epic poem in Old English, which was written down at least 1000 years ago. There will also be the first book ever printed in English, which, reassuringly perhaps, has inconsistent spelling. The French are both "frensshe" and "frenshe" in Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, published by William Caxton in Flanders around 1473.

Roger Walshe, the British Library's head of learning, said it had been "a hugely ambitious project for us, but a hugely enjoyable one as well". He added: "There is always interest in language and there are always debates about whether language is changing or declining or improving and also what is influencing language. We felt we were uniquely placed to be able to give a historical perspective to that debate."

The show will demonstrate how quickly language can change (does anyone today give a second thought to asking for a latte?), and how the same debates and fears crop up time and again. For example, one of the exhibits will be Jonathan Swift's Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue, from 1712, in which he angrily suggests that English is in chaos and a state-sanctioned group of experts is needed to "fix" it for ever.

That such a thing has never happened – unlike the Académie Française, for example – has made the English language unusually open to change.

A good chunk of the exhibition will look at how repeated attempts have been made to improve the way we speak English. The well-intentioned Victorian pamphlet Poor Letter H advised its mostly lower middle class readers that if they really want to get on in life, they should be saying house, not 'ouse, and head, not 'ead.

But the book also says the H should remain silent in words such as hospital and herb. Jonnie Robinson, the British Library's curator of sociolinguistics, said these words are only pronounced as they are now because of the mania for not dropping the H. "Our middle class anxieties of the 19th century have inserted an H because you got clipped round the ear if you dropped one."

Then there is the way we were meant to speak 50 years ago – the dreaded received pronunciation that first emerged from posh Victorian boarding schools and was adopted by the BBC, even though at its peak only 2% of the British population ever spoke in such a clipped, Celia Johnson way.

One exhibit will be a BBC pronunciation guide from 1928, in which broadcasters are told to pronounce combat as cumbat and housewifery as huzzifry.

There will be examples of the linguistic games people played, and a poem from Gleanings From the Harvest-Fields of Literature, published in 1867. In it, 130 years before the arrival of mobile phone texting, Charles C Bombaugh uses phrases such as "I wrote 2 U B 4". Another verse reads: "He says he loves U 2 X S,/ U R virtuous and Y's,/ In X L N C U X L/ All others in his i's."

The show will have listening stations where visitors can hear how regional accents have changed over the years, or hear the "remarkibold" nonsense of Stanley Unwin.

Visitors to the exhibition will also be able to contribute their own voice to the British Library's vast sound archive and can choose to read a book extract. Quite what future generations will think of thousands, perhaps millions, of people in the years 2010 and 2011 reading an excerpt from Mr Tickle, from the Mr Men, is another question, but it suits the library's purposes.

The exhibition will also feature, on loan from the Bodleian Library in Oxford, Robert Cawdrey's 1604 A Table Alphabeticall. The volume is considered the first English dictionary in the modern sense – an alphabetical wordlist with definitions – and it predates Dr Samuel Johnson's Dictionary by 150 years.

English in one form or another is now spoken by 1.8 billion people worldwide, and has had a successful history apart from the 300 years when the Normans were in charge, bringing in their French as the language of nobles and government. Also going on display will be the first evidence of an English king using English, in the form of a letter written by Henry V around 1419, in which he discusses the political situation in the north of England.

• Evolving English: One Language, Many Voices will be at the British Library from 12 November 2010 until 3 April 2011