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What specific variety of English did William Shakespeare write in?

Shakespeare’s language feels both familiar and distant to modern readers.It is often described loosely as “Early Modern English.”I want a more precise understanding of what that means linguistically.

 

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By Neeraj Seth Answered 3 months ago

From my experience teaching Shakespeare, his language is best described as literary Early Modern English shaped by rhetorical training and theatrical practice. I have seen students assume he invented a separate dialect, but in reality he worked within a flexible, rapidly changing language. I would recommend thinking of his English as performative rather than standardized. Its richness comes from exploiting variation in vocabulary, syntax, and register that were still unsettled in his time.

 

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