The Innovation That Changed the Future of English

English speakers were already tending to use subject, verb, object, word order. Once that order was adopted, that eliminated the need for most of those inflectional endings,. altogether. So a situation had been put in place where english could shift from inflections to fixed word order. It just needed a reason to do it. And that motivating force was the vikings and the need to reconcile the differences between old english and old norse.