Ashkenazi pronunciation

I was thinking in shul yesterday about the Ashkenazi pronunciation of Hebrew, and how, outside of the Chareidi community, it's rare to come across it nowadays, and was struck by how we expect it to be the case. If you stop and think about it, though, the implications are startling: Can anyone here think of any other case where a community the best part of ten million strong, has, over the course of just half a century, en masse abandoned the pronunciation it had been using for its liturgical language for six centuries—let alone a case where the community abandoned it so for a pronunciation made up by one man half a century beforehand, and then gone on to regard the historical pronunciation as old-fashioned and unattractive?

It truly is a remarkable phenomenon—and yet we all take it for granted nowadays!