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