The spread and globalisation of English has proved to be of interest in the study of diverse linguistic phenomena. From a methodological perspective, the study of Englishes poses a number of challenges, and attempts have been made to address these in corpus linguistics, sociolinguistic fieldwork and variationist studies. As such, this volume contributes to this increasingly fashionable, but still somewhat under-explored field of research by drawing together ideas from different frameworks and approaches dealing with English today.The different chapters reflect current trends in English linguistics research, and can be characterized broadly in terms of the study of the different diatopic and diastratic varieties of English, and the adoption of various theoretical and methodological perspectives. The chapters deal with the globalisation of English in itself and with the origin, development and status of varieties of English, often seen as a testing ground for different research traditions, including typological linguistics, second language acquisition, contact linguistics and sociolinguistics.