The other day I came across a picture of a trashcan from Seattle (featured left), with writing on it in English, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Spanish.

Confused, I emailed good ol' Librarian Girl, who is not only a genius and knows all, but also happens to live in the fine city of Seattle.

LG wrote back:

"Yep, there is a really large Asian population here - in fact, the majority population here (besides white) is Asian, with that group being made up of mostly Chinese, Vietnamese, and Filipino, and that doesn't count the people who don't live here permanently but are here for business and tourism, which is a lot too. There are so many booming immigrant groups here though, and some groups may not have the most numbers right now but they are growing at faster rates- like Russian immigrants for example. So like at the library where I work, for instance, we have collections in four major areas besides English: Spanish, Vietnamese, Chinese, and Russian. We are also going to be expanding into Amharic, as we have a booming East African population too, although finding publishers in that language that distribute in the US is really hard.

That's not to say that every public sign is in all of these languages-- it depends where you are. Like, at the airport, all of the directional signs are pretty much in English, but when you get on the people-mover-train thingy, the stops and the "please hold the handrail" announcements are in English, Spanish, Chinese and Japanese.

It's a big challenge for our graphic design department at our library, I know - how do you design something with a gajillion languages of text on it?

Wow, who knew I would go on and on about a picture of a trash can? I swear I can babble about anything."

You learn something new every day.