Ali Hussein Salman Hajjaj (1933–2004) was the first non-English speaking person to acquire a Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics of the English Language.
[citation needed] He attained his Ph.D. from Department of Linguistics and English Language of the University of Lancaster, UK in 1979.
(Master's degree) in Applied Linguistics from University of Lancaster, England in 1973.
The Title of his Ph.D. Thesis was "The Nature and Understanding of the Term Function and its Application to ESP".
Hajjaj's book Errors in English among Arabic speakers, co-authored with Nayef Kharma,[1] was one of the core works cited in a later paper "The English pronunciation of Arabic speakers: A data-driven approach to segmental error identification" by Rehmann et al.[2]