This chapter approaches the global spread of English by charting new ways of studying the expansion and diversification of English to non-native contexts. The research builds on the idea that the ongoing globalization of English calls for new empirical approaches to contact, variability, and the interplay of the established varieties andnew forms of English. It tests the methods of recent and ongoing grammatical change in investigating advanced non-native use. This methodology, combining historical linguistics and variationist sociolinguistics in a statistically sensitive corpus-based framework, has previously been used in the study of native varieties, but not in non-nativecontexts. The chapter first presents the compilation of a new multi-genre corpus ofadvanced English texts in non-instructional settings in Sweden and Finland, and then provides three case studies which examine how various lexico-grammatical variablescurrently undergoing change are adopted in non-native contexts. The results show substantial differences between traditional learner evidence and advanced non-native English in use, and indicate that the non-native evidence lands somewhere in betweenthe most advanced variety, standard American English, but ahead of other native and non-native inner and outer circle varieties. The findings therefore suggest that the processes and mechanisms of variability emerging in the globalization of English are more complex than previously thought.