While Arabic is the official language of the GCC countries, English is the de facto lingua franca (Alharbi, 2017). Due to the region’s diverse demographics, many other languages are also present in various speech communities. Multilingualism in the region is closely tied to globalization, and global businesses using English are omnipresent. Even with Gulf-based companies such as Saudi Aramco and Saudi Airlines, English is the language used to train employees (Mahboob & Elyas, 2014) and English is also widely used online, especially on social media (Dashti, 2015). Multilingualism has especially mushroomed in the Gulf as a result of the region-specific ‘culture of fast-paced change’ (Hopkyns, 2020a). Due to the relatively recent discovery of oil and other natural resources, Gulf societies have undergone rapid transformations on multiple levels. With urbanization rates of over 90%, the resource-rich countries of the Gulf comprise the most urbanized region in the world (Ewers & Dicce, 2016). In the space of decades, a frenzy of development has occurred in the economies of finance, real estate, retail and hospitality alongside dramatic changes to infrastructure and education. Such fast-paced development has necessitated the import of a large expatriate population working in these new sectors. The UAE and Qatar have the highest numbers of expatriates at just under 90% in both nations, and Oman and Saudi Arabia have the lowest percentages at approximately 45% and 33% respectively (GLMM, 2016). Although the Gulf’s multilingual population collectively speak over 100 different languages, Arabic and English are given textual priority in public spaces (Blum, 2014; Buckingham, 2015; Hopkyns & van den Hoven, 2021). Bilingual signage is often skewed slightly in favour of English (Ahmed, 2021; Hopkyns, 2021) despite Arabization efforts in place to ‘clean up the linguistic landscape’ such as Qatar’s Ministry of Municipality and Urban Planning issuing fines for signage without the presence of Arabic (Said, 2011b). In major Gulf cities, English is also more often heard verbally than Arabic or peripheral languages (Randall & Samimi, 2010), which is in part due to the unusually large expatriate communities using English as a lingua franca and English’s status as a global language.

The omnipresence of English in public domains is paired with full or partial EMI being a characteristic of the GCC countries’ schooling, especially in tertiary institutions (Al-Issa, 2020; Hillman et al., 2019; Hopkyns, 2020a). Mahboob and Elyas (2017) point out that, especially post-9/11, the Gulf countries have been affected by internationalization. Transnational political and economic pressure (Elyas & Picard, 2013) for Gulf countries to use EMI and imported Western curri...