Tudor English is the English of the Renaissance, of Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth I, and of Caxton and Shakespeare. This is also a period during which a large number of linguistic features supralocalised and spread throughout the country. Most, but not all of these changes were diffused from the capital region to the rest of England. My discussion will be focussed on some of these processes in their social contexts. Who were, for instance, the people who promoted the use in the south of the third-person singular verbal ending -(e)s, originally a northern feature, which made its way to the supralocal usage and later became part of Standard English? I will show the multiple sociolinguistic layers that can be uncovered analysing processes of language change in the Tudor period.
    The work I will discuss has been carried out by my research team and myself within the Sociolinguistics and Language History Project, which I launched together with Dr. Helena Raumolin-Brunberg at Helsinki University in the early 1990s. Our research is based on the electronic Corpus of Early English Correspondence explicitly compiled by our team for this purpose. The corpus covers the period from the fifteenth to the late seventeenth century (= CEEC 1998), and is currently being extended until 1800. Some of our pilot studies appeared in articles published in Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg (1996); a more comprehensive discussion of our findings is presented in Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg (In press).

References
Nevalainen, Terttu and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg, eds. (1996). Sociolinguistics and Language History. Studies Based on The Corpus of Early English Correspondence (Language and Computers 15). Amsterdam & Atlanta: Rodopi.
Nevalainen, Terttu and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg (In press). Historical Sociolinguistics. London: Longman.