The Language of Queen Elizabeth I: A Sociolinguistic Perspective on Royal Style and Identity: 46 (Publications of the Philological Society) - Softcover

I recommend this work to scholars specialising in Elizabeth I, regardless of their discipline; historical and present-day sociolinguists working particularly with idiolect research; and those interested in historical spelling variation and historical authorship attribution. (Cercles, 1 February 2015)

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