The Language of Queen Elizabeth I presents one of the first diachronic accounts of the language – the idiolect– of the Tudor monarch who ruled England and Ireland from 1558-1603.
- Suggests that Elizabeth I was a leader of language innovation and change, using it to build her complex social identity as a female monarch in a masculine position of power
- Examines a number of the monarch’s letters, speeches, and translations
- Establishes Elizabeth I’s participation in ten morpho-syntactic changes and explores her spelling practice
- Develops theoretical and methodological frameworks of variationist sociolinguistics through the analysis of the individual speaker
- Argues for the significance of style as a linguistic and material property in our account of language variation and change