This chapter satisfies curiosities about exceptions and why things don’t fit expected patterns by explaining the sound changes which resulted in such examples as goose/geese, wife/wives, child/children, holy but holiday and how verbs such as sing/sang/sung got to be that way. Addressing these irregularities explains in a straightforward way what sound change is, how it produced these oddities. The examples provide an understanding of the major sound changes that affect the history of English – Grimm’s Law, the Great Vowel Shift, umlaut, and others. The question of whether sound change is good or bad is answered.

The English language is generally discussed publicly with reference to an ideologically constructed correct form. Such discourses first emerged in the eighteenth century forming part of a long process of language standardisation, a process associated with major political imperatives. Standard language ideologies, articulated and maintained by powerful social groups, vary in different nations. Distinctive British and American ideologies are associated with critical points in national histories, and have the effect of disadvantaging specific social groups by disparaging their language varieties. Rather than being dismissed as examples of ill-informed misunderstanding of the nature of language promoted by powerful speakers for their own purposes, such ideologies can be considered more broadly as part of a larger set of perspectives on language articulated by language users, intimately connected not only with vested social and political interests but with explaining connections between language and the social world or describing its structure systematically.