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When did the British Royal family start speaking english ?

• There was a time when the elite im England spoke French but wrote in Latin, and only the peasants spoke english. Eventually the elite ended up speaking the language of the people, but the royals were slow to take up the language, and even Queen Victoria would speak German when she was at home and when she spoke english she did so with a German accent. But she could speak the languague. So when did the royals first start speaking english as I'm sure it must be before Victoria came along.

• Answer:

  There was a time when the elite in England spoke French but wrote in Latin, and only the peasants spoke English: but it was a *very* long time ago. The new Norman-speaking nobility of England, although they spoke Norman French among themselves, certainly started to pick up English from their nannies, servants and tenants within a generation or so of 1066. Henry I, the youngest son of William the Conqueror, was born and brought up in England and certainly would have known English. (The reason that Richard I didn’t speak it at all is that the Angevin kings really *were* foreigners: England was a relatively minor part of their empire, and they grew up mostly in central France.) The English nobility and royalty continued bilingual for several hundred years, with French as the elite language; but by the late 13th century textbooks for teaching French to upper class English children began to appear – a clear sign that English was now most noble children’s first language. Norman French (which was already nothing like the language of Paris) increasingly became an irrelevant anachronism; in the reign of Edward III English became the standard language for poetry and literature produced for the royal court. This first king of England who appears to have spoken no French at all was Henry IV, who broke with tradition at his coronation in 1399 by making the address from the throne in English, rather than in French as had been the custom for the past three centuries. Since then all the monarchs of England and Britain have had English as their mother tongue, except for: - James I (James VI of Scotland), whose mother tongue was Scots (that’s Scots as in Robert Burns’s poems, not Scots Gaelic) and who spoke with a strong Scots accent and many Scots words (e.g. “bairns” for “children”) all his life. - William III, husband of Mary II, who was Dutch, although his mother was an English princess and he certainly could speak English. - George I, who was born and brought up a German-speaker in Hanover, and was satirized on that account as being unable to speak and write English (although that was in fact not true). As for Queen Victoria, in her old age she actually made a phonograph recording which still exists, and her accent is certainly not in the least German. The link is to a very poor-quality re-recording of it (sorry, I couldn't find a better version)