Recent advances in sensor technology and information processing have allowed connected environments (i.e., infrastructures that host sensor networks for smart environment monitoring and management) to impact various application domains (e.g., medical, environmental). In order to manage these environments, existing works rely on the sensed data to detect specific events of interest. However, these works are not reusable since they rely on a static definition of their targeted events. Event Query Languages (EQL) can overcome this issue by allowing users to define and handle various events. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a generic EQL framework, specifically designed for connected environments, capable of (i) defining environments, sensor networks, events, application domains and all their related components; (ii) manipulating instances of these components; and (iii) ensuring the security/privacy of the data/users. Moreover, our proposal, denoted EQL-CE, allows users to handle the spatial distribution of sensors in the network, temporal constraints regarding the sensing tasks, and query re-writing. Finally, we evaluate our proposed language and conclude the paper with some future research directions.