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

Purpose This article examines how English is built into policy, digital, and academic governance systems in Jordan and selected Middle Eastern comparator contexts. It argues that English now functions less as a discretionary communicative resource than as an infrastructural condition of participation, recognition, and mobility. Design/methodology/approach The study combines Critical Language Policy and Critical Discourse Analysis to examine a purposively sampled corpus of 37 publicly accessible texts and artefacts. The corpus is organised across three domains: state and institutional policy texts, public and digital semiotic environments, and scholarly and accreditation-related infrastructures. Jordan provides the primary empirical anchor, while selected Saudi and Gulf materials are used analytically to test whether comparable governance logics travel across the region. Findings Across the corpus, policy texts link English to employability, benchmarking, and international standards; public and digital interfaces place English in the labels and pathways that enable navigation, transaction, and completion; and academic governance materials require English abstracts, keywords, or metadata for visibility and indexing. Arabic remains constitutionally and symbolically authoritative, but it is less consistently embedded in the infrastructures that confer auditability, comparability, and institutional visibility. Originality/value The article introduces Hyperlingua as an author-developed diagnostic construct for naming a configuration in which English derives governing force from its alignment with platforms, metrics, templates, and evaluative systems. In doing so, it shifts analysis from English as an object of linguistic description to the institutional design of multilingual participation and to the problem of multilingual justice under infrastructural governance.