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Ironically (for my generation in the UK at least) "Asian" meant "South Asian" and for a long time we didn't have a useful shorthand for "all parts of Asia"
by andybak 2mo ago
Ironically (for my generation in the UK at least) "Asian" meant "South Asian" and for a long time we didn't have a useful shorthand for "all parts of Asia"
- fragmede 2mo agoThat might be a local thing, Hong Kong being a British colony means there's plenty of people in the UK for whom Asian means Chinese.
- avadodin 2mo agoAsian to Brits definitely means South Asian(probably includes West Asians but I'm not sure about that). They were already bitching about this 30 years ago when the net was standardizing on American English where Asian means East Asian. The term for East Asian was Oriental which is now considered racist/passé for some obscure reason.
- Conan_Kudo 2mo agoIt's not obscure. The reason is because a whole class of racist laws use the term. Nobody has seriously tried to reclaim the term, so it is stuck with the connotation it had developed a hundred years ago.
- avadodin 2mo agoGenuinely curious which class of laws that would be. I assume you mean in the US but the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act makes no mention of race and anti-miscegenation laws speak of Mongolians(presumably to mean people of East Asian ancestry in general). I think Oriental in the US like the alternative Asiatic applied to all Asians from Istanbul to Vladivostok.
- thaumasiotes 2mo agoWell, there are two things going on there: 1. "Asia" and "Asian" are different words, which mean different things. 2. There is a dialectal difference specific to "Asian" between England, where Pakistani immigrants are prominent, and the United States, where they aren't.