If the languages that appear on ATM machines are any indication of how a society imagines its others, what are we to make of the fact that Arabic has appeared on some newly installed Shenzhen ATM machines?

I’d been thinking that it might have had something to do with the fact that roughly 8 months ago, China became the biggest importer of Saudi oil. But maybe not. According to non-random conversations with several friends (1) East Asian foreigners (Korean, Japanese, the other Chinas) are expected to read Chinese, and (2) Euro-descended foreigners are expected to speak English, after all the meaning of “外语 (outside language)” in everyday discourse is “English”. As in “I don’t speak 外语 (foreign language = English)”. This means that (3) Shenzhen’s third language needs to be another large, representative language of many speakers. And although Russian might have also been an interesting choice, it is a Euro-language and therefore counts as “English”. Moreover, given the way colonialism has reworked continental lingua francas , most peoples now speak some variant of a Euro-language (English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and other variants of “English”), leaving Arabic a clear favorite for Shenzhen’s third language and providing us with an interesting reworking of “three worlds” theory.

Thoughts?