The Language of Queen Elizabeth I

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The Language of Queen Elizabeth I presents a diachronic account of the language - the idiolect - of the Tudor monarch who ruled England and Ireland from 1558-1603. English language expert and Tudor scholar, Mel Evans, utilizes the principles of variationist sociolinguistics to identify and interpret the relationship between Elizabeth's changing language use and her social experiences as princess and queen. Examining a corpus of the popular monarch's letters, speeches, and translations, Evans' innovative research firmly establishes the queen's participation in ten morpho-syntactic changes. Evans' findings suggest that Elizabeth I was often in the vanguard of language innovation and change, with her stylistic choices (by genre or context) working to constitute and reflect her complex social identity as a highly-educated female monarch in a masculine position of power. A systematic analysis of Elizabeth's spelling likewise reveals the bearing of the queen's social experiences on her orthographic practice. While offering illuminating insights into a fascinating aspect of the last Tudor monarch, The Language of Queen Elizabeth I makes a broader argument relating to the importance of the individual speaker in sociolinguistic research, and the significance of style as a linguistic and material property in our account of language variation and change.