Roll on, Bureaucracy

This has always confused me: On some government forms, when they use different languages, the name of each language is printed in English. So, above the paragraph written in Chinese, for instance, it says Chinese—in English. And above the paragraph in Spanish, it says Spanish in English. But why? If you're looking at the Chinese paragraph, don't you know that it's Chinese, especially if you speak Chinese? (If you don't speak Chinese, what difference does it make to you that that unintelligible paragraph is written in Chinese and not Armenian?) If you're looking at the Spanish, you know that it's Spanish. It doesn't have to say that it's Spanish. And if it did have to say that, it wouldn't have to say it in English.

So who are these labels for? And who decided they needed to be there?

I don't think it's a simple, economical way to help government workers identify foreign languages. Or... maybe it is. Maybe if all of the languages are labeled in English then people who speak only English know how to find the right forms for a given situation? But usually when I see this phenomenon—as on this page of a form I received in the mail today, with Korean, Laotian, and Russian instructions—there's a whole bunch of languages listed, and not just one.

Here's a slight variation I spotted while researching health insurance plans:

In this version, at least the names of the languages appear in those languages, albeit after the superfluous English names.

I'm going to file this one under Mystery: unsolved.

Addendum: After writing this post, more of these things have surfaced. Now I see them everywhere. In figure 3, the name of the language appears—bolded and in English—after the text. Which seems pretty unreasonable to me. And in figure 4, well... Just look.

Fig. 4

Fig. 3

Now comes figure 5, from a beach in Bellingham, Washington. The breadth of Asian languages represented is impressive. But... why English labels, again?

Fig. 5

And here's one I saw on an online survey. This one fails in a number of ways.

Fig. 6