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From world Englishes to Hyperlingua: English as infrastructural governance in Jordan and the Middle East

Paper · 2026 · Mohamad Almashour, Hesham Aldamen and Marwan Jarrah

Summary

This sociolinguistics study asks how English becomes effectively mandatory in Jordan and neighbouring states even though no law declares it dominant and Arabic keeps its constitutional standing. The authors combine Critical Language Policy with Critical Discourse Analysis and examine a purposively chosen corpus of 37 public texts and artefacts. The corpus covers three areas: state and institutional policy, public and digital interfaces, and scholarly and accreditation infrastructure. Jordan is the main case, and Saudi and other Gulf materials serve as comparators to check whether the same logic appears elsewhere in the region. Across all three areas, English is tied to employability and international benchmarks. It is also the language of the interface elements that let users complete actions, and journals require it for abstracts, keywords and indexing metadata. Arabic remains symbolically central but is weakly built into these systems. The authors call this configuration Hyperlingua, meaning English that draws its authority from metrics, templates and platforms rather than from its speakers. They argue that multilingual justice therefore requires redesigning infrastructure, not just granting languages symbolic recognition.

Key points

  • The corpus contains 37 publicly accessible texts and artefacts, sampled purposively across three domains: policy, public/digital semiotics, and academic/accreditation infrastructure.
  • The design is Jordan-anchored, with Saudi and Gulf materials used as deliberately non-symmetrical comparators to test whether the pattern is portable.
  • Hyperlingua is the authors' own diagnostic construct. It is explicitly not a new English variety and does not imply a linear path of language change.
  • Bureaucratic bilingualism names the resulting order: Arabic is publicly affirmed, while English runs the procedures that make institutions auditable and comparable.
  • The paper positions itself against Kachru's Expanding Circle, ELF and Englishisation research. Its claim is that these frameworks miss the institutional conditions that fix the language before any interaction takes place.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. The paper separates a language's symbolic status (declared, affirmed) from its operational status (what the procedures actually run on), and shows that the two can diverge sharply.
  • I2. Interfaces, templates, metadata fields and platform defaults are treated as places where policy is enacted, even though they look neutral.
  • I3. The study checks where a language appears, not just whether it appears: English sits on labels that enable action, while Arabic sits in decorative or identity positions.
  • I4. The evaluation design uses one primary anchor case plus deliberately partial comparators to test whether a finding transfers, without claiming a full symmetric comparison.
  • I5. The authors reframe the research question from how something is used to how it is made necessary, which moves the analysis upstream to preconditions.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (frames): speech-act analysis could tag a clause as either an affirmation of a value or a procedural instruction, so a reader can detect when a text praises one thing but requires another.
  • I2 (learn): pipeline defaults such as the fallback tag, the default dependency relation, or the default answer when parsing fails should be audited as hidden decisions that shape what counts as correct.
  • I3 (world): entities in the world model could carry their functional role in the text (the step that triggers an outcome versus background mention), not only their presence.
  • I4 (learn): keep one deeply annotated anchor benchmark and add small out-of-domain comparator sets that only test whether a learned repair rule or parser behaviour carries over.
  • I5 (answer): when explaining an answer, the reader could cite not only the facts used but the preconditions in the text that made that answer the only admissible one.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓University of JordanAmman · Jordan14 works · 171 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksSocial Sciences · 1,772 worksCommunication · 97 works

🧭 Topics 2Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2,263 worksSemitic languages · 2,908 works

Cite

Cite as Mohamad Almashour, Hesham Aldamen and Marwan Jarrah. 2026. From world Englishes to Hyperlingua: English as infrastructural governance in Jordan and the Middle East. Frontiers in Communication 11.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.3389/fcomm.2026.1800770

@inproceedings{almashour2026world,
  title = {{From world Englishes to Hyperlingua: English as infrastructural governance in Jordan and the Middle East}},
  author = {Mohamad Almashour, Hesham Aldamen and Marwan Jarrah},
  booktitle = {Frontiers in Communication 11},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.3389/fcomm.2026.1800770},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2026.1800770}
}

References

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