I went to the ATM the other day and my choice of languages were English, Español, Chinese and Hmoob. What the heck is Hmoob I wondered. Well after getting online and researching it, I found that I wasn’t the only one wondering that same thing. I even found some journal entries related to this perplexing issue.
It turns out that Hmoob, or Hmong as it’s been roughly translated to in Engrish, is not only a language but a group of people from Vietnam, Laos and other small countries in that region of the world. Apparently some time ago, in the late 80’s I think, there was a movement to emmigrate from that war torn area to the United States. Turns out that they chose Minneapolis/St. Paul as a major location to centralize around. Today there are some 80,000 Hmong living in the M/St.P area. Somehow, a movement was made to add Hmoob to the Wells Fargo ATMs in M/St.P and I guess it carried to all ATMs around the country, or at least wide spread over a large part of it. Another web site I was looking at suggested that Hmoob is quickly becoming the third most common language in America, which could also justify it a bit.
Its funny what you learn when you actually pay attention to the ATM.