This presentation discusses ongoing research that focuses on exploring grammatical variability in advanced L2 uses of English in the expanding circle, i.e. in countries in which English does not have an official role but where it is widely used as a linguistic resource in today’s globalized world. This research is corpus-based, and my presentation focuses on the sources of evidence using the notion of “tyranny of writing”. For instance, up to today, most of the existing corpus materials from the expanding circle consist of learner corpora which are collections of short written essays collected from institutional settings. They are excellent tools but exclude a wide range of new mediated and vernacular genres. Similarly, the corpora from the inner core varieties of English, i.e. American and British English, contain materials from a variety of formal written genres, covering texts types of news, academic and fiction, etc. This presentation discusses how to make use of these best practices in English corpus linguistics to create a set of corpora of English use in the expanding circle. These new corpora should ideally represent not only formal written genres but also a wide range of vernacular genres, such as blogs, news-letters, Twitter messages, where English is used, but at the same time, these new sources of evidence should be comparable with the existing corpora in order to ensure diachronic comparisons.