The Language of Queen Elizabeth I: A Sociolinguistic Perspective on Royal Style and Identity

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