Speech is fleeting. Ideas flow through our minds, we desire to share our thoughts with others, and so we seek to do so through a series of agreed upon signals comprised mainly of voiced and unvoiced puffs of air. Perhaps our ideas linger in the listener’s mind, but the spoken word itself is here and gone in fractions of a second. Its ephemeral nature makes it readily subject to change. When we communicate via spoken word with one another, we learn from others what the current ‘acceptable’ pronunciations of words are for people in our social groups — yet bit by bit as we banter back and forth, we human beings change these pronunciations over time. England’s Queen Elizabeth the Second is 94 years old at the time I write this, and due to her high profile life she is one of the few people on earth that we have extensive audio recordings of throughout her lifetime. She’s a wonderful opportunity to observe how people’s accents may change over time. Speech Sleuths, I have gathered for you a selection of her majesty’s speeches from the late 1930’s through 2020 and invite you take a listen. Does her accent shift over time? (Suggestion: Listen to her first speech and to her most recent. Listen past the aging of her voice and focus in on pronunciation. What do you hear?).