Is Queen’s English Drifting Towards Common People’s English? —Quantifying Diachronic Changes of Queen’s Christmas Messages (1952–2018) with Reference to BNC

Abstract

ABSTRACT Queen's English (QE), a linguistic symbol of the royal or upper class, is a particular variety or an aristocratic form of English. However, QE has been dethroned by a surprising finding that it shifted phonologically towards common people's English (CE) between the 1950s-1980s, arousing a debate on its existence. Based upon Queen's Christmas Messages (1952-2018) and BNC, this study quantitatively investigated whether QE has experienced diachronic changes and drifted towards CE. Our PCA analysis shows QE's fluctuating lexical richness, increasing lexical complexity and synthetism, and steady syntactic features during the six decades. Piecewise regression and statistical results indicate 1) QE is drifting towards CE in lexical richness and complexity between the 1950s-1980s; 2) QE exhibits an interaction between a “drifting force” and a “deviating force” towards or from CE between the 1950s-1980s in syntactic features; 3) QE maintains a synthetic form distinct from the analytical one of CE over the 66 years. These phenomena are likely related to the collapsing social structure between the 1950s-1980s, identity building in Queen's early reign and age factor. This study firstly quantify the drift of QE towards CE lexically and syntactically, which may shed some light on quantitative investigation of diachronic language changes.