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But, it wasn’t in the language of the people!

English, French and most of the others had dozens of serious variants. The earlier Catholic Bible in English, the Douay-Rheims, was published in 1589 (NT) and 1611 (OT). It had to be cerated in France due to persecutions. You can tell by comparing them that English was still very much in flux, largely because of the great flexibility of the language in adapting words from other languages.

Shakespeare is said to have written in "Middle English", and no one could really understand the Canterbury Tales or Beowulf without learning what amounts to a completely different language.

The KJV itself certainly helped chart the course of English (more German cognates/origins, fewer Latin/Romance ones). But in the Middle Ages, Europeans who could read, read Latin.

But, it wasn’t in the language of the people!

Actually, the New Testament of the Douay–Rheims Bible was published two decades before the KJV and the Old Testament a few years before the KJV. It has long been acknowledged that the translators of KJV used portion of the Douay–Rheims New Testament in certain places.

The D-R and KJV were both translated by learned men, who had been educated in similar fashions, so it is not unusual that there are plenty of similarities among the two translations. Additionally, it's worth noting that when Bishop Challoner revised the D-R (the original had been mainly ignored by English-speaking Catholics) he relied heavily on the prose style of the KJV.

Though I am Catholic, I can certainly recognize that enormous impact that the King James Bible has had upon the world. Along with the works of Shakespeare, the KJV forms the basis for modern English; so, from the simply a linguistic point of view, the KJV certainly changed the world.

From a historical and political point of view, it gets a bit murkier. England's greatest era was certainly the three centuries which followed the KJV, much of the world was colonized by men who relied upon the KJV. However, though spreading Christianity was often the stated goal, the British were typically more motivated by power and profit. America is unique in that many Englishmen permanently moved to the colonies and our Founding Fathers descended from them and almost without exception these men viewed the KJV as the most important book ever written.