208 Journal of English Linguistics 50(2)

I would recommend Appalachian Englishes to anyone who wants to incorporate a

nuanced and updated perspective on Appalachia to an existing course. All of the
chapters work well as standalone readings, and the wide variety of topics covered in the
collection allow for incorporation into classes ranging from linguistics to education to
communication. The accessibility and open-endedness of the chapters can be an asset
when used in the undergraduate classroom, and I can see students getting ideas for their
own research from what has been presented here. To sum up, I felt that the cover design
truly captures the ethos of the book—stenciled black-and-white apple tree branches
appear over a spectrum of color on a black background. There are no tree-covered hills
or mountains, no dirt roads, but we still see a representation of the land, just in a very
different way than we might expect. And that’s a good thing.

ORCID iD
Jon Forrest  https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0201-1673

References
Anderson, Bridget L. 1999. Source-language transfer and vowel accommodation in the pat-
terning of Cherokee English /ai/ and/ oi/. American Speech 74(4). 339-368.
Bauer, Laurie & Peter Trudgill (eds.). 1998. Language myths. London: Penguin UK.
Garringer, Rachel. 2017. Well, we’re fabulous and we’re Appalachians, so we’re Fabulachians”
Country queers in Central Appalachia. Southern Cultures 23(1). 79-91.
Mallinson, Christine & Becky Childs. 2007. Communities of practice in sociolinguistic de-
scription: Analyzing language and identity practices among black women in Appalachia.
Gender & Language 1(2). 173-206.
Myrick, Caroline & Walt Wolfram (eds.). 2019. The 5 minute linguist: Bite-sized essays on
language and languages. Sheffield, UK: Equinox Publishing.
Reed, Paul E. 2016. Sounding Appalachian: /ai/ monophthongization, Rising Pitch Accents, and
Rootedness. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina PhD dissertation.
Wolfram, Walt & Donna Christian. 1976. Appalachian speech. Arlington, VA: Center for
Applied Linguistics.

Royal Voices: Language and Power in Tudor England. By Mel Evans. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2020 (hardcover). xi + 269. ISBN 9781107131217.

Reviewed by: Minna Palander-Collin , University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

DOI: 10.1177/00754242221095118
Book Reviews 209

Royal voices is an exploration into the language and texts that were produced to
construct and maintain the Tudors’ royal power. It surveys many types of royal texts for
their textual and visual characteristics in order to establish a possible royal voice of the
period. The term “voice,” as used in the book, refers to the complex interplay of “the
signs of the utterance; the means for that utterance to be distributed; and the processes
that entail, and sustain, the social recognition of those signs as a delineated social voice,
or register” (15). “Royal voice” is thus something that the contemporaries would have
recognized as a distinct way of communicating royal authority and speaking as a
monarch. The main argument of the book is that “social formulation of the royal voice,
as achieved through the dissemination of official authentic texts and through unofficial
practices of imitation and appropriation, was an integral part of the maintenance and
management of royal authority and the sociopolitical dynamics of the Tudor state” (11).
The book approaches the topic with an admirable scope that combines qualitative
and quantitative methods, a thorough philological sensitivity to the data, and a rich
sociohistorical contextualization. The outcome is an extremely multifaceted and de-
tailed, even breathtaking, picture of language practices constituting royal power during
the Tudor period from 1485 to 1603, including the reigns of Henry VII, Henry VIII,
Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I.
The book is divided into two parts, which focus on texts conveying authentic royal
voices and appropriated royal voices respectively. The authentic royal voices are
explored in royal letters and royal proclamations. The scribal letters form the most
extensive data set of authentic royal voices including 418 letters (ca. 285,000 words),
while the holograph letters are less numerous with 111 exemplars (ca. 43,000 words);
the royal proclamations corpus contains 290 proclamations (ca. 207,000 words). The
choice of the data enables explorations into the construction of voice in interaction with
different audiences, levels of formality, and provenance.
The appropriated royal voices are found in texts imitating, appropriating, or rep-
licating the royal voice in contexts that are claiming authenticity. This definition
excludes an otherwise obvious source of royal language, namely, literary represen-
tations. The choice of excluding “literary works” such as drama makes sense in this
context as they “generally make no claims to their evidential basis” (30) unlike texts
meant to be interpreted as authentic. The texts claiming authenticity include letters and
proclamations by three impostors, Perkin Warbeck, Edward Seymour, and Lady Jane
Grey, as well as royal reported speech in non-royal correspondence and chronicles.
Even though the impostors corpus is a small one with just thirty-eight documents, it
provides an innovative perspective on how royal discourse is understood and then
produced by those who do not possess the royal authority or have only a marginal claim
to it. Such documents provide evidence of the contemporary perception of royal
communicative practices and style. The fact that the authentic data set is more extensive
than the appropriated one is understandably reflected in the author’s treatment of them.
The discussion on authentic voices is longer and more varied as, for example, corpus-
pragmatic methods can be used more extensively.
210 Journal of English Linguistics 50(2)

Part I, examining authentic royal documents, first explores royal correspondence

and the materiality of letters (i.e., “visual pragmatics,” 22) in chapter 1. Again, the
choice is not haphazard but firmly motivated by the significance of visual elements to
the ways in which contemporaries interpreted letters. A letter was first seen rather than
read. In other words, it did not exist without its materiality embedded with social
meanings. The analysis focuses on material provenance, hand(writing), letter orien-
tation as portrait or landscape, signature placement, and signature form, which are all
important in constituting royal authority. Scribal letters and holograph letters are shown
to rely on different visual means as scribal letters clearly establish an institutional
authority, for instance, by placing the signature in the header. Scribal letters are
produced relying on the material conventions of scribal correspondence, so that the
consistent nature of their production and material aspects emerge as an essential factor
in establishing their authority and provenance. Holograph letters, on the other hand,
show the monarch’s personal hand and a more individualized way of constructing
authority. Holograph letters in general were intended for a more private and limited
audience than scribal letters, which is evident for example in Elizabeth I’s worried
reaction when she learned that James VI had passed one of her holograph letters around
his court (40). Although chapter 1 provides a detailed account of the material practices
of royal correspondence, photographs of letters would have helped the reader expe-
rience the texts more vividly.
The linguistic analysis of the royal letters adopts an exploratory, data-driven ap-
proach, which is how philology is often done today. In other words, corpus tools are
used to identify potentially interesting words or other linguistic patterns, which are then
explored and interpreted in more detail by close-reading the texts. In chapter 2,
keyword analysis is used to identify topics and stylistic characteristics of the letters, and
an examination of lexical bundles is used to explore the forms and distribution of
formulaic language. Both statistical techniques are nowadays widely used to detect
linguistic patterns, even as part of qualitative approaches such as corpus-assisted
discourse studies. Keyword analysis compares two text corpora and detects those words
that occur significantly more frequently in the focus corpus than in the reference corpus,
while the analysis of lexical bundles reveals co-occurrence patterns of N words, such as
three-word bundles. The author uses the quantitative findings of these analyses to
identify three thematic areas—metacommunication, royal self-reference, and royal
epistolary speech acts—that are explored in more detail from a pragmatic perspective in
chapter 3.
Four semantic categories of keywords stand out in the analysis when royal letters are
compared to non-royal letters of the Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC).
These are “abstract and general,” “social actions, states and processes,” “names and
grammatical words,” and “linguistic actions, states and processes” (69-72). The se-
mantic category “abstract and general” covers the biggest single portion (21 percent) of
the identified keywords. They refer to concepts relating to morality and appropriacy as
well as truthfulness and legitimacy, and they can often be placed in opposition with
each other like conform/traitorously and natural/unnatural. The author concludes that
Book Reviews 211

this prominent semantic group of keywords in royal letters in comparison to non-royal

letters “constructs and perpetuates a frame of reference that situates royal power within
a particular moral landscape, one in which their recipients and third-party referents are
positioned and subsequently evaluated in binary and polarized terms” (69).
When royal scribal and royal holograph letters are compared to each other, ho-
lograph letters show a more frequent use of the first-person singular and second-person
pronouns, whereas scribal letters are characterized by self-referential first-person plural
pronouns and grammatical keywords, such as wherein, nevertheless, forasmuch, and
thereof. These differences in keywords point to a different textual organization and
legalistic nature of scribal letters. The analysis of lexical bundles also yields results
showing systematic differences between scribal and holograph letters as the scribal
bundles are predominantly ideational in function, whereas the holograph bundles are
interpersonal. Ideational bundles in scribal letters are referential, world building. They
identify entities, objects, and their relationships in time and space. In contrast, the
prominence of first- and second-person pronouns as keywords and interpersonal
bundles in holograph letters brings them closer to the general characteristics of personal
correspondence.
The analyses of keywords and lexical bundles could certainly have given rise to
many types of pragmatic analyses, but the author has singled out three significant
features of the genre for scrutiny in chapter 3, including metacommunication, royal
self-reference, and royal epistolary speech acts. The analysis of these three features
highlights various facets of the interpersonal work between the royal authority and the
recipient. With metacommunication, the writer makes reference to texts in the ex-
tralinguistic reality of the current text and as such shapes the recipient’s interpretation of
the message (85). Self-reference is an integral part of any interaction, and the variation
and switches between I and the royal we have an important role in indexing the royal
persona (89). Finally, the kinds of speech acts (e.g., request, promise, offer, assertion)
and their formulations found in royal letters can shed light on the nature of the en-
gagement between the monarch and the recipient (99).
The results of these three analyses again testify to consistent differences between
scribal and holograph letters. For instance, the scribal metacommunication including
the word letter(s) refers systematically to the present document, acknowledges the
receipt of past letters, asserts the intended future letters, and refers to letters of third
parties. These our letters is an example of a reoccurring legalistic phrase establishing
the validity of the letter and authorizing the recipient to perform the activity specified
(86). The analysis of speech acts also shows how scribal letters rely on formulaic
language: they employ a small repertoire of lexical items in semi-fixed syntactic
constructions, such as compound verb phrases (will and command) and first-person
framing clauses (our pleasure is that). The author finds further evidence of the social
recognition and appropriation of such phrases in contemporary correspondence where
they are used by high-ranking noblemen to command subordinate recipients in the
king’s name (109).
212 Journal of English Linguistics 50(2)

With the material and linguistic analyses of royal correspondence, the author has by
now convincingly established the existence and nature of a Tudor royal voice, which,
she claims, constitutes a register in its consistency (114). The rest of the book reaches
outside the royal correspondence to see how pervasive the register was in other genres.
Chapter 4 focuses on royal proclamations that are “text-based announcements of the
royal prerogative made in a public place by a local official,” in other words, “a
declaration of lawful will of the monarch” (115). Proclamations have similarities with
royal correspondence as they too were prepared by royal clerks and had an interactive
purpose alongside of the legal purpose of issuing directives. Linguistically royal
proclamations and royal correspondence seem to converge in their legalistic aspects
especially in the beginning of the 16th century, but during the 16th century procla-
mations incorporate more epistolary-like elements. The author concludes that there
may be enough visual and verbal similarity in the royal documents that they “would be
heard as the same royal voice” (153). This hypothesis is tested in Part II on appropriated
royal voices.
After a brief chapter 5 that surveys how royal correspondence and proclamations
were described in contemporary documentation, chapter 6 explores the use of royal
voice by an impostor, a lord protector and a short-time queen, showing, for example,
that the royal we is a central device in all three cases. Since Perkin Warbeck, Edward
Seymour, and Jane Grey belonged to court circles and had connections to court clerks
and secretaries, they can be expected to be familiar with the royal voice. To broaden the
scope of the analysis to other social groups, chapter 7 looks into royal discourse
representation in non-royal correspondence, and chapter 8 explores how sixteenth-
century chronicles represented royal voices. In both cases, there are traces of formulae
and pragmatic markers associated with the authentic royal language, which suggests
that at least some features were recognizable enough to people outside of the royal
circles to be reproduced in unofficial contexts (234). However, the writers’ needs and
the purpose and conventions of the genres seem to have shaped the reporting of royal
speech even more. This is perhaps understandable as correspondence reports mostly on
royal spoken and private interactions, and chronicles employ more indirect than direct
reporting with an emphasis on the narrative and its progress. For example, reports of
Henry VIII’s speech include interjections, figurative expressions, interrogatives, and
exclamatives, but it is not clear to what extent these reflect his idiolect or the letter
writer’s preferences and general characteristics associated with speech and orality
(210). In some cases, it is possible to see traces of royal idiolects in these reports looking
at words that are quantitatively infrequent in sixteenth-century correspondence overall
but somewhat more frequent in authentic royal correspondence. The adverb eftsoon, for
example, is identified in this way, and it may have been Henry VIII’s idiolect as it
occurs in his authentic correspondence a bit more frequently than in the sixteenth-
century letters in CEEC. Furthermore, Stephen Gardiner in his letter states that this is
how the king spoke to him (211).
In this book, Evans provides a convincing yet complex case for the Tudor royal
voice and shows how the royal register served as a tool in establishing royal power. The
Book Reviews 213

Tudor monarchs seem to have had a somewhat personal and private voice, whereas the
scribal practices were the machinery that constructed and maintained a constant and
recognizable royal voice to the extent that it was imitated and appropriated in unofficial
contexts. Although the book stems from a sociopragmatic, sociolinguistic, and corpus
linguistic background, it is essential reading for any scholar working on the Tudor
period.

ORCID iD
Minna Palander-Collin  https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8428-4423

Corpus
Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC). 1998. Compiled by Terttu Neva-
lainen, Helena Raumolin-Brunberg, Jukka Keränen, Minna Nevala, Arja Nurmi,
and Minna Palander-Collin at the Department of Modern Languages, University
of Helsinki.