With the passing of Queen Elizabeth II, people ranging from presidents to parliamentarians have been paying tribute to the woman whose reign spanned seven decades. And while much has been said about how she was the consummate example of grace and propriety, little has been said about something else she was well known for: The way she spoke. The “Queen’s English,” as it was often called, long served as a model of prestige, and looking at changes in how she spoke over time shows us she became more in tune with the people she served as the years went on.
What Is the Queen’s English?
Evoking a privileged and upper-class way of speaking, the term the “Queen’s English” pre-dates Queen Elizabeth II, encapsulating the view that the language of those with power is illustrative of how speech “should” be, for instance, pronouncing the ‘t’ in “bottle” as opposed to saying “Bo’le.”
In fact, in 1864, the Dean of Canterbury, Henry Alford, penned a book called A Plea for The Queen’s English during the reign of another highly regarded queen, that of Queen Victoria. In it, he expounds on virtues such as knowing when to properly use lay vs. lie and includes the admonition not to drop one’s ‘h’ sounds, as in “‘appy” for happy.
Alford’s book was a usage guide for those looking to sound like the upper crust at a time when language was very much a gatekeeper to high society. This higher-class British dialect persevered and is referred to in modern times as Received Pronunciation (RP) or, more recently, Southern Standard British. And, as far back as the 17th Century, the English spoken by the Royals has held sway as the idealized form of correct speech.
Sounding More Like a Commoner
But, for most of those living in modern Britain, this variety became more fuddy duddy than functional and out of touch with the lives they led and the way they spoke.
A queen and her language are often removed from the experience of everyday life Source: Mark de Jong on Unsplash These days, younger speakers, including the upper-crust, speak more like the everyday commoners that make up the majority of the country, and have nudged the standard British dialect more toward a mixture of RP and Cockney, melding into something known as Estuary English.
Estuary English incorporates historically lower-class features such as saying words like Tuesday as ‘chewsday” instead of “t-yoosday” as well as l-vocalization (saying the ‘’l” sound in a word like will or milk more like a vowel, e.g., “miwk”) and it has emerged as the speech of everyday people – both high-brow and low-brow. Such evolution is nothing new in the long course of English’s history, as language naturally varies over time and much of what is standard today came from what was not standard yesterday.
And beyond adopting such new features, most Southern Standard speakers have also changed up how they are saying their vowels, with words like bad or had sounding less like the traditional RP “bed” pronunciation toward a more open mouthed ‘bad’ pronunciation. In addition, the highly recognizable upper crust pronunciation of the final sound in words like happy, sounding more like “hepp-eh” rather than “happ-ee,” has also started to fade over time, in a process called vowel tensing.
Typically, younger speakers are the ones on the cutting edge of language change, so it is perhaps not all that surprising that young royals like Prince Harry and Prince William have adopted some of these modern speech features. But did Queen Elizabeth also change the way she spoke during her long reign? And if so, what does it tell us about the changing society over which she ruled?
A Queen of Change
In the early 2000s, a group of researchers in Australia tackled this question, with the permission of Buckingham Palace and a little help from the BBC. Jonathan Harrington and colleagues used BBC recordings of the Queen’s annual Christmas broadcast to look at whether her speech had changed from her early days in the 1950s through the 1980s, when she had settled comfortably into the role.
What did they find? That the Queen’s speech had shifted toward sounding a bit more like modern Southern Standard British speech. Though the changes were subtle, the researchers discovered that she, for instance, pronounced had less like “hed” and more like “had” and said the sound at the end of happy with a slightly tenser vowel. Her speech still remained distinguishable from mainstream speech but had started to sound a bit more like those over whom she ruled.
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How Do You Know What You Know? The researchers suggest that, early in her reign, the Queen’s English was less similar to the speech around her as a result of the more rigid social and class structure that defined the times. The ensuing decades saw massive cultural changes in Britain which resulted in a collapse of stark class divides and a more egalitarian society. The result was a shift in both mainstream Standard British English and in the more conservative Queen’s English as well, bringing them both closer to the everyday speech heard throughout London.
So, while there is no doubt of the impact that Queen Elizabeth had on the world during her long reign, it seems that the Queen also took to heart, and to her speech, the changing world around her, becoming more similar to those over whom she ruled.