The contribution provides an overview of the fifty-year success story of corpus linguistics. It acknowledges the enormous technical advancements and the excellent corpus resources available today – at least for some of the major languages in the world. A direct consequence of technological development is the rise of usage-based theoretical models in contemporary linguistic research. At the same time, the contribution points out the still deficient treatment of spoken spontaneous language in corpus linguistics and recommends giving more attention to the development of multilingual corpus resources in the future than has been done so far. Finally, it raises the question of the future function of corpus linguistics within the framework of Digital Humanities. Manuscript profile