This issue of Anglistica deals with variation and varieties of English from a wide range of perspectives and methodological approaches mainly from within sociolinguistics and discourse analysis. The empirically oriented papers analyse a range of different types of field-gathered authentic data and corpora, covering intra- and inter-language, intra- and inter-speaker variation, variously involving register, genre, stylistic, diaphasic, diatopical, diastratic and diachronic types of variation. The issue aims to contribute to the ongoing debates on language variation and its implications, highlighting its dynamic social and socio-psychological functions and meanings as well as some taxonomic and terminological issues.