The Death of Monarchs: Front-Page Reporting of Queen Elizabeth II’s Death

This is a linguistic and semiotic study of the newspaper front pages that reported the death of Queen Elizabeth II. A sample of 61 front pages was collected from various British and non-British newspapers on Friday 9 September, 2022. The headlines reporting the death of the Queen were linguistically analysed focusing on euphemistic means. The pictures accompanying the headlines were semiotically investigated to see how the Queen was visually mourned and if there were any subtle semiotic euphemisms. Reporting the death of the Queen, linguistic and semiotic polarities can be observed on the newspaper front pages under investigation: direct versus indirect reporting. The findings reveal that 70.5% of the headlines reported the tragic news indirectly avoiding the verb ‘die’, the noun ‘death’ and the adjective ‘dead’. Similarly, the semiotic analysis shows that more newspapers displayed coloured (67%) recent (57%) pictures of the Queen showing her cheerful (56%). Avoiding the words ‘die’, ‘death’ and ‘dead’ and displaying the Queen in coloured cheerful pictures demonstrate that newspapers favoured both subtle linguistic and semiotic euphemisms in reporting the death of Queen Elizabeth II. The findings illustrate how humans, consciously and unconsciously, safeguard themselves against the discourse of death by utilizing both linguistic and semiotic euphemisms.