📄 Editorial: Transactional and transnational contact within World Englishes: the Gulf region and beyond

Summary

This editorial introduces a Research Topic collection on how English works as a shared contact language in workplaces and service encounters shaped by labour migration and mobility. The main focus is the Gulf, especially the UAE. There Arabic is official, but English serves in practice as the everyday lingua franca among speakers of many Englishes and many first languages. Two European cases (Belgium and Croatia) widen the picture. The editors summarise six studies that use different methods: questionnaires on ATM language choice, narrative interviews with mobile managers, geosemiotic analysis of speech and public signage, a qualitative learner-writing corpus, video-recorded business appraisals, and recorded tourist–staff talk. Taken together, the studies show three things. English dominates practical transactions, yet other languages keep their roles in identity and private life. Interlocutors depend heavily on context and adapt their pragmatics to each other. Gulf writing may even show signs of an emerging local variety. The collection matters for understanding ELF within the World Englishes paradigm and for language policy in multilingual societies.

Key points

• Six studies in total. Four are set in the UAE (ATMs, tourism managers, transactional speech and signs, student writing). One looks at a Belgian company, and one at tourism in Croatia.
• ATM language choice in Dubai (Al-Issa & Sulieman, post-use questionnaires):
  • Non-Arabs chose English whatever their length of residence or English proficiency.
  • Arabs used Arabic more often.
  • Emirati citizens picked Arabic less often than other Arab users.
• Transactional English in the UAE (Lanteigne & Najafi):
  • Both utterances and signs depended on earlier communication or on accompanying visuals.
  • Public signs were judged more explicit, probably because they are planned and revised.
• Student writing (Parra-Guinaldo, corpus of first-year university texts):
  • The study catalogues morphosyntactic ELF features in tenses, prepositions and determiners.
  • Some features look specific to the MENA region, which leads to a cautious proposal of "Gulf English."
• European cases:
  • In a Belgian firm (De Malsche et al.), three strategies appeared: English, receptive multilingualism, and a lay interpreter. The firm aims to adopt English company-wide.
  • At the Zagreb airport Visitor Center (Vida-Mannl), staff varied their discourse, solidarity and hesitation markers according to how proficient the tourists were.

Interesting ideas

• I1. Non-native patterns in tense, preposition and determiner use are treated as possibly systematic features of an emerging variety rather than random errors.
• I2. Hearers in mixed-language settings pick the fitting sense of an underspecified utterance from situational knowledge, prior exchanges or visuals.
• I3. Planned, revisable text (signs) comes out more explicit than spontaneous speech, which leans on shared context.
• I4. Speakers shift along a cline of pragmatic markers (hesitation, solidarity, discourse markers) depending on the listener's proficiency.
• I5. Communication without a shared first language can work through receptive multilingualism or an informal interpreter, not only through one common language.

For Mova

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

• I1 (tree): Treat Gulf/ELF-style deviations as a dialect to normalise or convert, not as noise. Robustness of the parser could then be measured separately on such text.
• I2 (world): Ambiguous or elliptical inputs should be resolved against the current world-of-text state and earlier turns, rather than read in isolation.
• I3 (learn): Split evaluation sets by planned versus spontaneous register, so that drops on elliptical spoken input are visible rather than averaged away.
• I4 (frames): Read such markers as signals of speaker stance and audience design when inferring speech acts, instead of stripping them as filler.
• I5 (back): Translation through the meta-world could model a mediator role, with a meaning graph relayed between parties.