Nominative thee in Quaker plain speech

The Religious Society of Friends, also known as Quakers, form a historically Protestant (but in the contemporary context theologically diverse) set of denominations. Friends practice a non-doctrinal, non-creedal form of worship centered around important principles called testimonies. Of these, the testimony of simplicity is most relevant to the concerns of formal linguistic enquiry, as it is the core of the Quaker value of plain speech, which is associated with a number of lexical (e.g., First Day instead of Sunday) and morphological differences (e.g., the use of nominative thee in conjunction with third-person singular agreement). This study compares the thee-usage of Liberal and Conservative Quakers. It finds that nominative thee is a thriving retention in Conservative Quaker English, and that it exhibits much more variation in morphological and sociopragmatic licensing properties than has been known to previous work, which has focused on Liberal Quakers. Depending on their language socialization and ideologies, Conservative Quakers may use thee is, thee are, thou art, or you are. A Distributed-Morphological account of this microvariation is pursued and best practices for research on Quaker Englishes are proposed.