The Queen’s speeches through time: Gender, identity, and Britishness

The late Queen Elizabeth II’s life was marked by a series of historic moments, both at a personal and at a public level. Each time, these events were accompanied by the delivering of a speech, whose words have remained fixed in time and form part of the Queen’s legacy. Her Majesty’s speeches represented both herself and her own identity (as a woman, a wife, a mother, a grandmother, and as Head of State) and, at the same time, British society and its development throughout her seventy years of reign. While the more obvious features of the diachronic development of these speeches can be discerned by considering the media used to deliver them (from radio to television broadcast, to their streaming on social media) and by linking them to the Queen’s evolving roles in life (from Princess to Monarch, from newlywed to widow, etc.), it is also important to analyse their linguistic evolution, since language (and, more specifically, word choice) is a mirror of both personal identity and society. Therefore, this contribution proposes an analysis of Queen Elizabeth II’s most famous speeches, including, among others, the wartime broadcast on BBC Children’s Hour (1940), the Coronation Day speech (1953), the address to the nation on the death of Princess Diana (1997), the Diamond Jubilee speech to the Houses of Parliament (2012), and the Queen’s pandemic speech (2020). In particular, the analysis of keywords will shed light on instances of gender (how it was performed through language and how it could be related, for example, to issues of authority), identity (its negotiation between private and public life), and Britishness (elements of culture that linked the Queen to her country and her people). The ultimate aim is to contribute to a historical reconstruction of the language used by the Queen, to understand its impact and importance, and, last but not least, to help commemorate her remarkable life