The Language of Queen Elizabeth I

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 powerExamines a number of the monarch’s letters, speeches, and translationsEstablishes Elizabeth I’s participation in ten morpho-syntactic changes and explores her spelling practiceDevelops theoretical and methodological frameworks of variationist sociolinguistics through the analysis of the individual speakerArgues for the significance of style as a linguistic and material property in our account of language variation and change