Correction: From world Englishes to Hyperlingua: English as infrastructural governance in Jordan and the Middle East
Year: 2026
Type: erratum
Abstract: Over the past five decades, English has undergone a transformation in the Middle East that exceeds prevailing accounts of language spread, foreign language education, or contact-induced change (Kirkpatrick, 2017;Hillman et al., 2020). In Jordan and across the Gulf, English increasingly mediates access to higher education, academic visibility, professional mobility, and institutional services delivered through digital and administrative platforms (Hamdan & Abu Hatab, 2009;Kirkpatrick, 2017;Zuraiq et al., 2023). It circulates through university regulations, accreditation mechanisms, employment protocols, and digitally administered systems that structure everyday participation in public and institutional life (Galloway & McKinley, 2021). This expansion has not been driven primarily by explicit language policy declarations or by the . It designates a condition in which English functions as an infrastructural substrate, embedded across governance rationalities, technological systems, and evaluative regimes. In this configuration, English derives its authority not primarily from speakers, norms, or claims of local ownership, but from its integration into mechanisms that structure access, measurement, and institutional recognition (Blommaert, 2010;Fairclough, 2006;Larkin, 2013). Appeals to global standards and internationalisation operate ideologically to naturalise this embedding, allowing English to bypass local linguistic agency while preserving the symbolic visibility of Arabic (Phillipson, 1992;Pennycook, 2017).Jordan is examined here not merely as a national case but as the primary empirical anchor for analysing how digital infrastructures and datafied governance reconfigure linguistic hierarchies under contemporary reform conditions (Fairclough, 2006). As a resource-constrained state positioned within regional circuits of labour mobility and higher education internationalisation, Jordan illustrates how English becomes infrastructurally necessary without being formally declared dominant (Hamdan & Abu Hatab, 2009;Zuraiq et al., 2023). Selected Gulf materials, principally from Saudi policy and accreditation contexts, are incorporated not to construct a fully symmetrical cross-national comparison but to identify parallel governance logics across related reform environments. In this sense, the article treats Jordan as the analytic anchor and the Gulf as a strategic regional comparator through which the broader Middle Eastern portability of Hyperlingua can be tested.Framed as a contribution to critical language policy and the sociology of multilingualism, this study approaches language policy not as a set of official declarations but as an assemblage of documents, platforms, evaluative instruments, and routinised practices (Wodak & Meyer, 2016). Drawing on planning texts, public digital portals, and academic submission infrastructures, the analysis demonstrates how symbolic bilingual affirmation coexists with procedural monolingual operation. This configuration is theorised as bureaucratic bilingualism, in which English becomes the operational language of governance while Arabic is retained as the emblem of cultural and political identity. The outcome is a redistribution of linguistic agency, where access to recognition and participation is structured not through explicit regulation, but through infrastructural alignment (Pangrazio et al., 2024).The article proceeds as follows. Section 2 situates the study within critical sociolinguistics and develops the theoretical lens of infrastructural power. Section 3 explains the Jordan-anchored but regionally comparative design, the corpus, and the analytic procedure. Section 4 presents the findings across policy texts, public and digital environments, and academic governance. The article concludes by considering the implications of infrastructural English for multilingual justice, language planning, and the future of language governance in digitally mediated institutional systems.Critical scholarship on global English has been shaped by three influential paradigms: World Englishes, English as a lingua franca (ELF), and research on Englishisation in language policy and higher education. Collectively, these traditions have played a decisive role in decentring native-speaker norms, challenging deficit framings of non-Western English use, and documenting the institutional expansion of English across education, employment, and governance. Despite their critical contributions, however, these approaches remain partially constrained by assumptions that are increasingly strained under late-modern conditions, where English is embedded not only in communicative practice or curricular policy, but in the infrastructural conditions through which institutions operate, evaluate themselves, and render their activities visible. Kachru's (1985) Expanding Circle framework continues to shape representations of English in the Middle East, positioning the region as norm-dependent and externally oriented. Subsequent World Englishes scholarship has productively challenged this framing by foregrounding pluralisation, linguistic ownership, and the legitimacy of localised Englishes (Bolton, 2010;Saraceni, 2015;Schneider, 2007). Yet much of this work remains oriented toward questions of variety emergence, codification, and identity affiliation. Such emphases offer limited explanatory traction in contexts where English is highly consequential but does not stabilise as a local variety and is not widely claimed as a language of belonging. In these settings, English exerts power less through processes of nativisation than through institutional embedding.Research on ELF has similarly unsettled native-speaker ideologies by foregrounding pragmatic negotiation, multilingual repertoires, and flexible communicative practices in interaction (Seidlhofer, 2011;Jenkins, 2017). However, its analytical focus on interactional accommodation leaves under-theorised the institutional and technological preconditions that determine when English becomes the default medium prior to any encounter. Where access, documentation, evaluation, and recognition are preconfigured through English-facing systems, the central issue is no longer how meaning is negotiated in interaction, but how participation itself is enabled or foreclosed through infrastructural design.Policy-oriented research on Englishisation moves closer to this concern by examining Englishmedium instruction, internationalisation strategies, and ranking regimes (Doiz et al., 2013;Galloway & McKinley, 2021). In Middle Eastern contexts, this literature has demonstrated how English is discursively aligned with global competitiveness, employability, and institutional prestige, particularly in higher education and elite professional sectors. Nonetheless, Englishisation studies have tended to focus on moments of policy adoption and curricular reform, offering fewer insights into the durable and routinised conditions that emerge once English is embedded into bureaucratic procedures, platform interfaces, and evaluative infrastructures. The infrastructural aftermath of Englishisation under conditions of datafication and platform dependency remains comparatively under-theorised.Across these traditions, a shared analytical limitation becomes visible. English is most often examined as a language that is used, taught, or promoted, rather than as a system-level condition that organises access, legitimacy, and institutional recognition. Responding to calls within critical sociolinguistics to attend more closely to governance, scale, and inequality (Blommaert, 2010;Kumaravadivelu, 2008), the present study reframes English not as a linguistic object but as an infrastructural arrangement through which institutional power is enabled and regulated.The concept of Hyperlingua is introduced not as a replacement for World Englishes, ELF, or Englishisation, but as an analytic extension operating at a different scale. Developed through iterative movement between these literatures and the present corpus, the construct responds to a problem they do not centrally theorise: the infrastructural conditions through which English becomes operationally necessary. World Englishes and ELF remain indispensable for understanding linguistic practice, identity, and interaction, while Englishisation research provides critical insight into policy adoption and institutional expansion. Hyperlingua advances these traditions by asking not only how English is spoken, learned, or promoted, but how English is designed into systems of governance, evaluation, and visibility. In doing so, it links linguistic ideologies and policy processes to the sociotechnical infrastructures through which linguistic power is stabilised, routinised, and rendered politically deniable.The Middle East provides a strategically salient context for examining English as infrastructure. Since the mid-twentieth century, English has been entangled with state-led modernisation, technoscientific development, and global integration across the region (Miller, 2003;Mahboob, 2014;Kirkpatrick, 2017). In the Gulf, English occupies central roles in higher education, privatesector employment, and public communication, shaped by transnational labour mobility, international branch campuses, and imported governance logics. National development strategies increasingly frame English not as a foreign language but as a prerequisite for participation in the knowledge economy. Hillman, Selvi, and Yazan's (2020) notion of functional normalisation captures this configuration by shifting attention from variety formation to bureaucratic routine. 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Source: Frontiers in Communication
Institution: University of Jordan
Language: English
Subfield: Linguistics and Language
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Reduced inequalities
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $1,418
OpenAlex ID: W7162769397