Paying with time: English, time inheritance, and the case for temporal linguistic justice in higher education

English proficiency is widely regarded as both a mechanism of inequality and a potential route out of it. This conceptual article argues that these two accounts share a common analytical blind spot: neither attends systematically to time — specifically, to the inherited temporal conditions under which English is acquired, performed, and institutionally recognised in higher education. Drawing on the time inheritance framework by Xu and the broader canon of sociology of time, this article introduces the ‘ temporal ledger ’ of English: the tally of time costs and savings that acquiring and performing English demands. The ledger is structurally unbalanced: those who inherit the most disadvantaged temporal conditions pay the longest acquisition premium, bear the heaviest participation burdens in English-medium higher education, and face a systematic recognition tax through which institutional and perceptual mechanisms discount their English regardless of its actual quality. Even when English successfully functions as a temporal accelerator, compressing otherwise foreclosed trajectories, the recognition mechanism of global higher education imposes further temporal costs that compound inherited disadvantage. This structural paradox cannot be addressed by access interventions alone. The article proposes temporal linguistic justice as a new policy concept demanding institutional redress across three levels: K-12 pipeline conditions, higher education gatekeeping and participation, and the recognition norms of global knowledge production. The time inheritance framework, this article concludes, offers the analytical tools to interrogate the English question not only as a matter of who can participate, but of whose time that participation is designed to cost.