The Language of Queen Elizabeth I

<p><i>The Language of Queen Elizabeth I</i> presents one of the first diachronic accounts of the language – the <i>idiolect</i> – of the Tudor monarch who ruled England and Ireland from 1558-1603.</p> <ul> <li>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</li> <li>Examines a number of the monarch’s letters, speeches, and translations</li> <li>Establishes Elizabeth I’s participation in ten morpho-syntactic changes and explores her spelling practice</li> <li>Develops theoretical and methodological frameworks of variationist sociolinguistics through the analysis of the individual speaker</li> <li>Argues for the significance of style as a linguistic and material property in our account of language variation and change</li> </ul>