AbstractThis article focuses on grammatical variation in English as a lingua franca (ELF). Calling for more systematic corpus studies, it presents three empirical perspectives that broaden and deepen the study of grammatical variability in ELF. These approaches focus on tracing how ongoing grammatical change in core and emergent modal auxiliaries is adopted in ELF. The empirical evidence is drawn from various ELF corpora that cover multiple genres. Utilizing the quantitative paradigm and building on corpus‐based variationist methods, the three perspectives highlight and call for more studies (1) in which the object of study consists of broad grammatical categories and which compare quantitative patterns between ELF and other types of Englishes, (2) that combine quantitative methods with close‐up qualitative analyses, and (3) that investigate probabilistic constraints in ELF grammar. The results show that ELF is shaped by the same natural evolutionary processes that affect the established varieties.