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20th Century English (The transition from Early Modern English to the actual Modern English)
In the early 1600s English was much like French today, the 2nd-person plural form was also the polite form of address to one person. English speakers alternated a lot between "thou" and "you," as French speakers do today between tu and vous, although this difference is due to the politeness required. Vous is used to talk to a high rank person, while tu can be used to address to a known person.
By the early 1700s, "thou" was almost unknown, so much that contemporary memoirs by Friends, like the American Elizabeth Ashbridge, who died in 1755, recount incidents like this one:
'In this Condition I continued till my Husband came, & then began the Tryal of my Faith. Before he reached me he heard I was turned Quaker, at which he stampt, saying, "I'd rather heard She had been dead as well as I Love her, for if so, all my comfort is gone." He then came to me & had not seen me before for four Months. I got up & met him saying, "My Dear, I am glad to see thee," at which he flew in a Passion of anger & said, "the Divel thee thee, don't thee me." '
By the early 1700s, the use of "thou" and "thee" was a sign of being part of the Society of Friends, unless you were addressing God in prayer or public worship, where the older sense of God as "thou" has persisted till very recently and still has a place in hymns and the King James Bible.
The linguistic change here reveals a social change, the disappearance of a hierarchy of respect that is still deeply encoded in Europe. It's hard to specify an exact origin or course of events, but we simply have chosen to eliminate the familiar form, to treat all people, including strangers and children, with respect. In a sense, we lack a form to use to social "inferiors," perhaps because the concept of social inferiority, though alive and well in English-speaking countries today, is now considered somewhat "unspeakable." This reason is because in almost all English-speaking countries there was once a little bit of racism, and it has been abolished in most of them.
The last paragraph has some consequences, the most important one is that English is now a world language. During Elizabeth’s reign, the English government, though an international player, was largely concerned with its own island, and not the whole of that, Scotland being a co-equal neighbor. James I was also King of Scotland, and the thrones were officially united until 1701; the throne of Ireland was united to that of Britain in 1798. As this consolidation went on at home, Britain won and lost empires overseas, America and the West Indies in the 1600s, India in the 1700s and 1800s, Australia in the 1800s, and Africa in the 1800s and 1900s. From the margins of Western Europe, the English language came into common use on all the world's continents. England also became the world's greatest economic power, the motor of the expansion of capitalism that we call the Industrial Revolution in the 1700s and 1800s. One of the most important factors in this imperialist expansion was the homogeneity of standard written English, without which it would have been really difficult to obtain that imperialist expansion at the degree they did.
