The book introduces the reader to the central areas of English linguistics. The main sections are: the English language and linguistics, sounds, meaning-carrying units, sentences, models of grammar, meaning, utterances, and variation. Notably, the book is written from a foreign student's perspective of the English language, with particular attention given to aspects relevant to foreign language teaching. A great deal of emphasis is placed on the insights to be gained from the analysis of corpora, especially regarding the idiomatic character of language, including the idiom principle and valency approach. In addition, the text offers basic facts about the history of the language and elaborates on the differences between British and American English. The author demonstrates that a linguistic fact can usually be described in more than one way. To this end, each section contains a chapter dedicated to it.