This book showcases sixteen papers from the landmark 30th conference of the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (ICAME) held at Lancaster University in May 2009. The theme of the book ‘looking back, moving forward’ follows that of the conference where participants reflected on the extraordinary growth of corpus linguistics over three decades as well as looking ahead to yet further developments in the future. A separate volume, appearing as an e-publication in the VARIENG series from the University of Helsinki focuses on the methodological and historical dimensions of corpus linguistics. This volume features papers on present-day English and the recent history of English via the increasing availability of corpora covering the last hundred years or so of the language. Contributors to the volume study numerous topics and datasets including recent diachronic change, regional and new Englishes, learner corpora, Academic written English, parallel and translation corpora, corpora of popular music pop lyrics and computer-mediated communication. Overall the volume represents the state of the art in English corpus linguistics and a peek into the future directions for the field.